Intune Win32 App deployment – A gamechanger

One of the biggest limitations in Microsoft Intune has been that we can only deploy single-file .MSI’s and not .EXE installers. With the release of Win32app install support (in Preview) that limitation is now gone!

Not only does it support legacy setups like .exe files for instance we can also use it for advanced .MSI files with more that one file and Transform files as well.
That is a great feature, if you select an .MSI file to install when we create the wrapped installer it actually fills in Uninstall Command and Detection method for us automatically.
Let’s have a look at how it works when we add an .MSI file using the Win32app option which was a a pleasant surprise that it added command line and detection rule automatically when a .MSI file is selected.

To start with we need to create a wrapped file containing all the files needed by the setup using the Intune win32app wrapping tool which can be found here: https://github.com/Microsoft/Intune-Win32-App-Packaging-Tool 

We use that tool to create an “.Intunewin” file that can be uploaded to Intune, it will ask for folder and executable to run. Note that the current file size limitation on the .Intunewin file is 2GB in Technical preview.

Now we have our .Intunewin file we can use with Intune.

Once that is done we can log on to the Azure Portal and create our application.

We now get a couple of pages with information to enter about our application. As we can see we can configure detection rules to define if the installation is successful or not. We get all of that filled in if we selected an .MSI file to deploy during the creation of the .IntuneWin file. 😀

App Package file, this is where we select the file that should be uploaded to Intune.

We then go through the wizard step by step

The next step is the program to run, as we selected the .MSI file before the command line is already created for us which makes it so simple.

We add our transform file to the command line so it looks like this instead.

Requirement, here we can set requirement for the application to install, Windows 1o versions, memory, disk space and more.

Detection rules, this is something we are used to in Configuration Manager, in our example as we selected an .MSI when we created the IntuneWin file the detection rule is already filled in for us under MSI. We can use script, registry, file or MSI product code.

We can also add our own return codes and what they mean as well.

When we click Add to add the application we have created, we get this dialog until the upload of our .IntuneWin file is completed, it can take a while depending on the Internet connection that is being used.

Now we are ready to deploy our newly created Windows Installer App with an .MST.

For me this is a Game Changer and closes the one thing I missed the most in Intune, it is simply a great addition! I will follow up this post with a more detailed on troubleshooting Win32app deployment.

More information can be found in the Ignite session recording on the topic: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/64593#ignite-html-anchor

And the official documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/apps-win32-app-management