“Some companies may need more identifying information in their names than others due to operational and architectural complexity, which is OK. The conventions still stand and will flex regardless of your individual environment. ”
Naming conventions are something that you can debate about with your colleagues while trying to pick the best. It’s important to follow some simple rules when naming resources. Standardization makes things easier: reports look good, troubleshooting is easier, and training is quicker.
Of course, if you have only one environment to look after, eventually you will get used to any resource naming convention and you will master all the ins and outs. Microsoft Intune has numerous entities, making it easy to lose track of entity names and their purposes.
This becomes more problematic if you have a big team and/or manage multiple Intune tenants.
Having a standard Intune naming convention is helpful when backing up or restoring configurations manually or through automation. When explaining project work, it’s important to use resource names that are easy to understand, can be filtered, and look good. This helps both customers and in-house IT during handover. ?
Here few simple principles for naming groups, configuration and compliance policies, and more.
Be Minimalist
Choose the necessary criteria for the name, excluding unnecessary or duplicate criteria.
Good Example: Prod/UAT, OS type, purpose of resource, targeted scope
Bad Example: Prod/UAT, OS type, purpose of resource, targeted scope, Type of config, tenant org name, config details, …
Be Hierarchical
Most common identifying information should come first. Followed by more specific identifying information.
Good Example: Prod – Win10 – MicrosoftEdgeBookmarks – Finance
Bad Example: Finance – Win10 – MicrosoftEdgeBookmarks – Prod
Be Self-Descriptive
Try to maintain contextual relevance when choosing names – make names self-descriptive.
E.g., It’s better for a config name to be coherent with group name, or app config name should contain the name of the target app.
Good Example: AppConfig – AdobeReader
Bad Example: AppConfigNew, AppConfig-App0723
Be Human Readable
Shortening names is fine as long as humans can still understand the context when reading them. If you have to memorize the abbreviations, then you’re cutting out too much context.
E.g., use spaces and reasonable abbreviations.
Good Example: Prod – Win10 – MicrosoftEdgeBookmarks – Finance
Bad Example: PW10MSFTEFIN
Be Date Ordinal
Additionally, you might want to include a version in your names of configs or policies – this is more relevant to UAT environments than production. Having explicit date of the config in reverse format would help to identify differences between versions for example, in automation scenario, when configs are exported, and settings compared programmatically.
Ensure you start with Year, then month, then date. Or should ordinal dates where month and day are swapped for 1 – 365. We use YYYY-MM-DD at Mobile Mentor as we feel it’s easier to read by humans.
Good Example: YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-DDD (use 001 – 365 for DDD)
Bad Example: DD-MM-YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY or DDD-YYYY
Conclusion
This should give you a good best-practice naming convention for your Intune entities. Some companies may need more identifying information in their names than others due to operational and architectural complexity, which is OK. The conventions still stand and will flex regardless of your individual environment.
Microsoft Intune is a part of Microsoft Endpoint Manager and provides the cloud infrastructure, the cloud-based mobile device management (MDM), cloud-based mobile application management (MAM), and cloud-based PC management for your company.
If you would like help with Intune or just someone to task questions to once in a while, check out our Intune Support service or contact us.
