Entertaining bug of the day: Autopilot + Task Sequence

If you are doing user-driven Windows Autopilot provisioning in combination with a ConfigMgr task sequence initiated via “Co-management settings” in Intune, you know that the task sequence is tracked as an application during the device ESP phase. (Read up more on this scenario in my previous blog if you want to learn more about this.)

While normally you would install apps then as part of the ConfigMgr task sequence (which will run hidden unless you do something like I described in this blog using an automated Shift-F10 trick), so there would only be one “app” tracked by ESP, there’s nothing that stops you from installing apps from Intune at the same time (although watch out if those are MSI apps). If you do that, you’ll see ESP tracking a number of apps. In my case, it showed seven apps:

But as soon as the task sequence completed, the number changed:

What happened to app #7? Well, when the ConfigMgr task sequence completed, it marked the ConfigMgr policy provider, used to tell ESP about the “apps” that ConfigMgr was installing, as “not installed”, apparently cleaning up after itself as the task sequence had finished. That caused ESP to completely forget that the “app” had even existed, hence the drop from 7 apps to 6.

Oops. At least it’s a relatively harmless issue.