Modern App Management with Microsoft Intune

👋 Introduction

Managing applications in Microsoft Intune becomes far more effective now with App Inventory, Deployment Plans and EAM (Enterprise App Management) Auto Updates.

• App Inventory gives you clear, device-level visibility into every app and its metadata, helping you quickly identify unmanaged software and reduce shadow IT.
• Deployment Plans let you roll out apps and updates in controlled stages, with the ability to pause or stop deployments if issues arise.
• Auto Updates then keep your applications consistently up to date, minimizing risk and reducing manual effort.

📋 App Inventory

You can find the new App Inventory when you select Device in the Intune admin center under Devices.

Here you can find a new pane called All apps. Under this pane you will find two tabs:

• Managed apps: That is the Inventory with discovered apps you already know from the past.
• App inventory This is the new inventory, which lists all the managed and unmanaged apps on the device. This uses a new method of discovering and collecting this information, enabling it to gather much more information about these apps.

INFO

App inventory will update its information at least every 24 hours, but in most cases it will be 6 hours at most.

The search in the new tab also works much better, and finds information across all the fields and even if the string is not an exact match. In addition you can select from the following columns to display in the inventory:

• Name
• Architectures
• Estimated size (Bytes)
• Install date
• Installed for
• Installed location
• Languages
• Last updated
• Modify command
• Package name
• Publisher
• SID
• Uninstall command
• User Entra ID
• User name
• Version
• Windows MSI product code

Please note that the export will only include the information currently displayed. For example, if you search for something and select only specific columns, only this information will be exported. This means that you no longer need to weed out your exported files, but can export the information you need directly.

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To make this work, you need to have Intune collect the information first.

1. For this you first need to open the Intune admin center -> Devices -> Configuration and click ➕ Create.
2. Select Windows 10 and later as the Platform and Properties catalog as Profile type.

3. Click Create enter a name, description and click Next again.

4. After clicking Add property, you will now see a new category called ApplicationproPerties appear. Select this category completly, click Select.

5. Now you will also see the standard refresh cadence of 24 hours shown, which you can not change at the moment. Click Next again, select your Scope tags, Assignments and create the profile.

INFO

This feature is included in the Intune standard license.

📈 Deployment Plans

Deployment Plans provide a phased approach to application distribution, offering admins a feature they have been hoping for for a long time. This framework enables administrators to implement multi-stage releases, validating software stability within smaller groups before scaling deployment across the environment.

• Phased Risk Mitigation: Uses deployment rings to test apps in smaller groups before broader rollout
• Standardized Workflows: Reuses rollout templates for consistent deployment schedules
• Operational Agility: Lets admins pause, resume, or stop deployments mid-rollout
• Infrastructure Visibility: Connects to app inventory for real-time status and metadata

You can find a demonstration of this feature in this Microosft Mechanics video here.

Important

This feature is is still in preview and will not be visible to everyone and licensing is not yet clear.

📲 Auto Update Apps

In order to start using the auto-update feature, you will need to create a new app. It is not possible to transform an existing app into an auto-updating one. However, this is hardly necessary, as the app will set itself up and update over time anyway. Therefore, there would be no functional difference between creating a new app and transforming an existing one.

1. For this you first need to open the Intune admin center -> Apps -> Windows and click ➕ Create.
2. Select Enterprise App Catalog app as the App type.

3. Click Search the Enterprise App Catalog and search for the app you want to add, select it and click Next.

4. Now select the app configuration you want and click Next.

5. Now you come to the actual auto-update setting. In the last app selection page you got the option to either select the standard Update with supercendence or Automatically update. Select the Automatically update option and click Select.

Update with supercendence	Automatically update

6. Now that the app is selected you can just click through the next stepts, add your scope tags, assignments and create the app.

INFO

If you select the automatically updating app, notice that most options in the app configuration process are greyed out, because they could change with every update.

In the App view you can now see that there is a new information called "Update Method" which shows Auto-update.

in the app overview, you can now also see a new app type on your newly created app called Windows Auto Update Catalog App.

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Following you will see an exaple of an auto update app that was created in February 2026, but in the Device installation status you see that it was last updated on a device on the 28.04.26 with the newest version of the app, which was released on the 26.04.26. This shows that the app was automatically updated without any manual interaction the next time the device was online after the release and testing from Microsoft.

INFO

This feature is included in the Enterprise App Management standalone licence, the Intune Suite licence, and, from August 2026 onwards, the Microsoft E5 licence.

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Also new with this Intune release is a report showing all the EAM apps that are ready to get an update. This will not show Auto-Update apps, because they will already have been updated automatically by then.

💡 Conclusion

Microsoft has released a few great new features that make managing apps through Intune much easier. They have also delivered features that many have been requesting for a long time.

If you've got an E5 licence, there's no reason not to use EAM in future. The other features are included anyway, so you can take advantage of them without any downside.

References

• Microsoft Intune Blog - Secure apps: Where people, data, and AI intersect
• Microsoft Learn - Intune Discovered Apps
• Microsoft Learn - Microsoft Intune Enterprise Application Management
• YouTube - New App Management Controls in Microsoft Intune