Last Updated on March 29, 2024 by rudyooms

In this blog, I am going to take a closer look at a new setting in Entra to prevent users from becoming a local administrator on their devices during the Entra Join

I will zoom in on how the settings in Entra could interfere with the user account type settings you configured in your Autopilot profile

I will divide this blog into multiple parts

1. Introduction
2. DeviceRegistrationPolicy vs Autopilot Profile
3. Conclusion

1. Introduction

Quite unexpectedly, 2 new wonderful settings appeared in Entra. You can these 2 new settings to configure the local administrator settings in Entra under: Devices –> All Devices –> Device Settings

With the first setting, we can now define if the global admin role will be added to the administrators’ group. If this role is added to the administrator’s group, everyone who holds that role in your organization will become a local admin on the device. Luckily with this setting, we can now block that from happening during the Entra Join.

With the second new setting that also arrived, we can now define who may become a local administrator on the device during a regular Microsoft Entra Join. Before we could configure this setting, the user who was performing the device registration would always become a local admin on the device by default. The only way until now to prevent this from happening was using Autopilot.

If we want to prevent this from happening we could configure a similar setting in the Autopilot profile. In the Autopilot profile, we have the option to define if the user account that was enrolling the device would become a standard user or an administrator during the out-of-box experience.

With the new second setting showing up in Entra, we don’t need to use Autopilot anymore?(don’t take this literally… just use Autopilot!). This new local administrator setting is configured to ALL by default.

My advice? Configure it to “None”. Having the registered user become a local admin on your device is a bad idea.

All cool right but what happens if we configure the user to be a standard user in the Autopilot profile and the setting to add the registering user to the local administrator group is still configured to its default setting: ALL?

Before you go any further, it could come in handy to first read my blog about how the device registration policy works during Autopilot and how Autopilot will prevent the user from becoming a local administrator

2. DeviceRegistrationPolicy vs Autopilot Profile

Well, if you take a look at the picture below, I will show you 2 scenarios.

In the first scenario, I configured the Entra local administrator setting to NONE but I configured the account type in the Autopilot profile to: Administrator

In the second scenario, I am doing exactly the opposite. I configured the entra setting to add some selected users to the local administrator group (configuring it to all, will lead to the same outcome)

3. Conclusion

The conclusion? If you are using Autopilot and you configured the user account to standard you are good to go even when the Entra setting is still configured to ALL(or selected).

Besides this policy, please make sure you are preventing the global admin role from being added to the administrator’s group by changing the corresponding setting to NO.