Intune is a mobile management solution from Microsoft which you can purchase under Enterprise mobility suite or as an individual license. From previous blog posts, I have talked about Enterprise mobility suit and Intune. Also, I have talked about securing Office apps from Intune. Not only Microsoft apps, there are other applications vendors which support Intune App protection policies. Let's find out in this blog post how to configure none-Microsoft apps with Intune.

What are Managed Apps?

Intune App protection policy enables you to protect data on device applications. You can define the apps and set of policies to control the actions. These protected apps are called managed apps. You can define policies such as prevent cut, copy, save as, screen capture, also you can allow data transfer only within the managed apps. As an example, if the policy targeted to Outlook and Word when you get an MS Word attachment through email, you can only open it using Microsoft Word and cannot move data beyond that.

What happens when Outlook is a managed app and you get a PDF as an attachment?

You cannot open the attachment, because when you configured to allow data transfer only within managed apps. To open a file following conditions should be met:

• The relevant app should support the Intune SDK
• The relevant app should be installed on the user’s device
• App protection policy should be targeted to the app (Manage app)
  
  

Intune MAM Supported Apps

Intune SDK supported apps are available as store apps in Google Play Store and Apple Store. You need to push these apps to the devices from app deployment. Following Microsoft URL contains these apps and number of apps which support MAM will update within time. 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/cloud-platform/microsoft-intune-apps

Deploying Apps to users

 You can use the same way as deploying office store apps to the user.

Android

You have to copy the URL from the Google Play Store and paste it on App store URL. Als, fill in other details.

iOS

Adding iOS apps are rather easy, you need to select app type as iOS and type the app name in the search box

Add Apps to App Protection Policy (MAM policy)

MAM policy can be targeted to apps by selecting the relevant application. But we can select only the Microsoft specified applications. For third-party Android apps, you have to specify the Package ID and for iOS, Bundle ID should be provided. From following ways you can find the package ID and the Bundle ID for an app

• For iOS - Intune portal (Bundle ID)
  

  Intune portal go to the apps, from columns select App Identifier

  
  
  
• For Android – play store URL (Package ID)
  For play store apps package ID can be extracted from the app URL – com.adobe.reader.intune
  

To add the application to the app protection policy,

• Select or create the relevant app protection policy
  
  
  
• Go to the Target apps and click More apps
  
  
  
• For android type the extracted package ID, and for iOS type the bundle ID
  
  
  

Still, there are only a few number of apps support Intune but according to the roadmap, it should increase.

Hope this post is useful.

Asitha De Silva

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