I was looking through what is new in Microsoft Intune and I’m really pleased to see the addition of bulk actions into the Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin console, it’s also there in the full Microsoft Intune blade in the Azure portal too. This means we can now perform an action such as a wipe, retire, restart etc across a a whole ad-hoc bunch of devices. I’m really pleased to see this addition as although it’s a fairly basic thing in the grand scheme of things, it’s something that we as admins are required to do in real-life on a fairly regular basis for various reasons.

To use the feature we need to go to Devices > All Devices and you will see the Bulk Device Actions option. Note that we don’t need to have any specific devices selected at this point, we can choose them later.

Once you’ve selected this, we see step 1 of a wizard type screen where we can select the Operating System (OS) and the Device Action.
NOTE: The actions are dependent on the OS that you choose. Not all actions are available for every OS.

For this example I’m simply going to restart a bunch of Windows 10 devices. There are other options too.

ALSO NOTE: there’s an element of risk in this particular scenario, the user won’t be notified and it will be lights out.

When we hit next we can go and select the devices. Note that the selected devices stay in the list, they are just greyed out.

Once we hit select, we see the summarised list.

Now we simply “Create” the request.

And you should see a successful request made.

That’s it, as simple as that. I’m not going to walk through the whole bulk action list right now, but look out for other posts including them.

One other thing I do like in here is the option for custom notifications. I did a blog post recently on how to do custom notifications to iOS and Android mobile devices and now this addition allows us to be a little more dynamic. This is a big plus for me on this particular area.

/Peter