Patch My PC Ideas & Feedback
A community where customers and the community can provide feedback to make a better product for everyone! For more details on how we prioritize requests, please see:
A community where customers and the community can provide feedback to make a better product for everyone! For more details on how we prioritize requests, please see:
One thing which we would like to see which Patch my PC is very close to offering is being able to create groups and monitor devices within the group.
In the portal app discovery (which I’m assuming is from the Intune monitor Discovered apps), you can see that X PC’s have Y software, but you can only use preexisting groups to deploy to.
Would it be possible to have the portal create groups based upon the app it’s found, and include the devices with said app in the group? Then when you run a refresh it updates the PC’s in those groups?
I know from the AppInvRawData export it lists the device names. So adding those devices should only require the permissions to create the groups and add the devices to it.
The concept of adding a device to a group based on discovery data to then update it is flawed. The problem with the discovery data is that it's stale and slow, so if you uninstall an app from a device, it would continuously get back installed because the inventory data wouldn't update fast enough for the device to be removed from that group.
The way to solve the scenario where you want to conditionally update the app is to create an "Update-Only" app and assign it to "All Devices" and "All Users". That Update-Only app will check in real time if an update is required on the device, and update the app, only if it's required.
If there's a different scenario this feature would fix, please let us know in the Comments below :)
Apologies for not making it clear where to leave the info we are asking for in the Admin Response above :) Here's a reply from Reddit, putting it here so we have everything in one place:
From my perspective there are two main scenarios for using inventory-based groups, based on how we previously used these with Configuration Manager device collections:
- applying update-only deployments to all devices and all users results in 100+ scripts being run across the entire environment on a regular basis. This has a noticeable impact on performance and creates a lot of unnecessary PowerShell noise in telemetry that's used by the security team. It would be significantly more efficient to deploy the update-only script to only the devices that have the application installed. Because the most recent version is always deployed as Available as soon as published, we're fine with updates waiting until the inventory catches up.
- inventory based groups are extremely effective for Uninstall deployments to clean up the environment, like (from memory) Oracle Java 8 eradication or, as one of the comments mentioned, enterprise browser standardisation
I really miss device collections and it would be amazing if PMPC Cloud helped fill this gap.
If the Intune advanced analytics application discovery data isn't sufficient or isn't licensed, could use the PMPC agent to collect.
Microsoft added a new data type App inventory data from Application Properties.
For Windows devices that need faster refresh cycles and richer app metadata, see App inventory. App inventory is the intended long-term replacement for Discovered apps and collects data multiple times per day with additional properties like install location, app size, and uninstall commands.
Maybe this will enable PMPC to create such dynamic groups based on this data.
Glad to see this is already in Ideas.
After watching the recent "Take Back Control of your Browsers" episode of PMPC TV where they outlined issues related to detection scripts and built-in versions of Edge, we deployed Edge Enterprise MSI to all of our workstations and first indications are an improvement in time-to-compliance. The ability to create inventory-based "device collections" in Intune would make this standardization process easier for other software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpfP1nlpUbY
Comparison to ConfigMgr Dynamic Collections
This proposed feature would mirror the behavior of dynamic collections in Microsoft Configuration Manager, where device group membership is automatically updated based on inventory data (e.g., installed applications). By leveraging app discovery data already available in PMPC, the portal could:
Automatically create and maintain device groups based on detected software.
Dynamically update group membership as devices install or uninstall the app.
Enable targeted deployments and reporting without manual group management.
This would bring a familiar and powerful capability from ConfigMgr into the cloud-native PMPC environment, easing the transition for organizations moving from on-prem to cloud-based management.