Last week, I had the chance to attend the Workplace Ninja Summit in Baden, Switzerland, together with three colleagues. In short: it was an incredibly valuable experience. The sessions from Microsoft and community experts made one thing crystal clear:
☁ Cloud-native first is no longer a future vision – it’s the new standard.

✅ What does that mean in practice?

• Intune only instead of Co-Management
• Entra ID only joined instead of Hybrid
• Zero-Touch Provisioning with Autopilot
• Updates via Windows Update for Business + Autopatch
• Telemetry & troubleshooting powered by Intune Advanced Analytics
• And finally: saying goodbye to GPO legacy baggage

🍏 macOS & Intune – Microsoft’s clear ambition

Microsoft wants to become the leading MDM for macOS. You can see this in the latest features:

• ✅ Platform SSO for macOS (Entra join + Kerberos TGTs for SSO)
• ✅ LAPS for macOS (currently supported only during enrollment, expansion planned)
• ✅ ESP for macOS is rumored to be on the roadmap – nothing official yet, but the community strongly expects it. Until then, community tools fill the gap.

🚀 My favorite community tools from the sessions

• IntuneBrew (by Ugur Koc) – macOS app management
• brewpkg (by Ugur Koc) – manual macOS App packaging
• Octory and macOSESP – ESP alternatives
• IntuneLogReader (by Somesh Pathak) – log analysis for macOS and also for Windows
• MacMate (by Somesh Pathak) – device information
• ABM-API-Client (by Somesh Pathak) – GUI for Apple Business Manager
• MacBeacon (by Somesh Pathak) – security & compliance monitoring

🔮 Patch My PC – what’s coming next

• macOS app support (currently in preview)
• ARM app support (currently in private preview)
• Advanced Insights moving to the cloud (CVE compliance, hardware inventory, battery health)
• SCCM → Intune app migration: fully automated, a real game-changer for migration projects

💡 My conclusion

The summit reinforced one key message: Hybrid is on its way out. Moving to a cloud-native approach isn’t just about new features – it’s about stability, security, and automation. For me personally, this was a huge motivation boost to push upcoming projects even more in that direction.