After 3 UserVoice items requesting the “Locate Windows 10 devices” feature, with the Intune service release 2104, Microsoft added the ability to fetch Windows 10 device location from the MEM Admin Center.
This blog post gives you a quick walkthrough of the new “Locate device” remote action feature and how you can use it easily to get the geographical location details of your managed Windows 10 endpoints.
Table of Contents
Intune New Remote Action – Locate Device
With this feature addition to Intune, in the event of a lost or stolen device, Intune admin can trigger the Locate device remote action to get the location details for the particular device.
As of now, this is only supported for the specific platforms as mentioned below.
- Supervised iOS devices running iOS 9.3 or later (requires lost mode to be enabled first to use locate device action)
- Windows 10 devices (should be corporate-managed and not BYOD) running the below OS versions
- Windows 10 20H2 or later
- Windows 10 2004 or later
- Windows 10 1909 or later
- Windows 10 1809 or later
Retrieve geographical location of a managed device is not available for MacOS and Android at the moment.
As MS mentions in their documentation, the feature is also not supported for Windows Phone, but let’s be practical – do we even have Windows Phone still existing in 2021?
Locate device with Intune: Fetch Windows 10 device location
In the MEM admin center,
- Navigate to Devices > Windows > Windows devices
- Select a device from the displayed list that you want to locate
- Select the 3 horizontal dots on the right side as highlighted to get the newly added remote action – Locate device.
- Click on Yes in the prompt.
- The remote action will be triggered.
Till the action gets executed on the endpoint to fetch the location data, the status of the remote action will show as pending.
Location services must be enabled on devices for this remote action to work. If Intune cannot fetch the device’s location and the user has set a default location in device settings, it will display the default location.
The endpoint must remain active for the remote action to succeed quickly. I received the notification that the work account has requested device location on my test device within 5-10 mins of triggering the locate device remote action.
Once Intune is able to fetch the device location succesfully, you should see the status of the Locate Device remote action as Completed in the MEM Admin Center.
Further, under Device action status, you can see date and time stamp for the remote action along with its completion status.
The location data as retrieved by Intune remains stored for 24 hours and is visible in Intune for the duration. Post that the location data is removed automatically by the service. As an Admin, you can’t manually remove the fetched location data for a device.
For me, the entire process, tried for the first time, completed within 20 mins. That was quite fast. However, as I mentioned earlier, the time taken to get the geographical location of a device depends on the device's activity. If the device is not active or falls out of the grid, then the action may not complete.
Locate device with Intune: View the geographical location
You can now view the geographic location of the device (powered by Bing maps) by going to the same Locate device remote action.
There are three view modes available for the map data which you can choose using the highlighted drop down.
Wrap Up
Though Intune is not and was never intended to be a GPS tracking solution for endpoints, one of the shortcomings of Intune has been its incapability to fetch the location details of the managed devices.
As such, the new locate device feature is a much welcome addition. For more information about this new feature addition, you can always refer to the official MS documentation.
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Do check out my other blog posts on this site. 🙂