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NamingPilot

Intune naming convention: a practical guide

What a good name carries, a pattern that works, the limits to respect and how to roll it out.

Portrait of Maksymilian Olowski

By Maksymilian Olowski

Microsoft Intune Administrator · Updated · LinkedIn

Why bother

Intune does not ask you for a naming convention. You can call a profile “Test 2 final” and it will deploy just the same. The cost comes later: a list of two hundred policies you cannot filter, a conflict nobody can trace, a colleague who has to open ten profiles to find the one that sets the Wi-Fi.

A convention fixes that for almost no effort. When every name has the same shape, the search box in the admin center becomes a filter, the list sorts itself into groups, and a name answers the three questions you always have: what is this, what does it do, and who gets it.

What a good name carries

Most Intune names need four things, in this order:

PartAnswersExamples
PlatformWhich operating system?WIN
TypeWhat kind of policy?CONF
PurposeWhat does it do?EdgeBaseline
RingWho receives it?PRD

WIN-CONF-EdgeBaseline-PRD

Platform - Policy type - Purpose - Ring

Platform comes first because that is how you browse: Windows policies together, macOS policies together. The purpose is the only part you write yourself, so keep it to what the policy is about, not one setting inside it.

Open this pattern in the builder

Rules that keep names readable

  • Same order, every time. A name is only sortable if its parts are always in the same place.
  • One separator. Hyphens are the easiest to read. Pick one and never mix.
  • Short codes for what repeats, words for what does not. WIN and COMP repeat a hundred times; the purpose is unique, so spell it out.
  • No people, no dates. “Anna’s test” and “2024” are out of date the day after. If something is replaced step by step, use a version: v1, v2.
  • Decide on casing and stick to it. Whether you write EdgeBaseline or edge-baseline matters less than doing it the same way everywhere.
  • Leave out what is always the same. If you have one tenant and no rings, a tenant prefix and PRD on every name only make names longer.

Limits to respect

Some names have hard limits, and it is cheaper to know them before you agree on a pattern.

A Windows device name set by an Autopilot naming template must be 15 characters or less, can have letters, numbers and hyphens, and cannot be all numbers.

Source: Configure Windows Autopilot profiles, Microsoft Learn.

A group’s display name in Microsoft Entra can be at most 256 characters.

Source: group resource type (Microsoft Graph), Microsoft Learn.

A tenant can hold at most 240 Conditional Access policies, whatever their state.

Source: Plan your Microsoft Entra Conditional Access deployment, Microsoft Learn.

For policies and profiles, Intune does not publish one limit that holds for every type. Keep names well under what a list column can show, and try your longest name in your own tenant before you commit to a pattern. In NamingPilot you can set the limit to whatever you find.

Different things, different patterns

One pattern does not fit everything. A device name has 15 characters to work with; a Conditional Access policy needs a number. These pages have a pattern for each:

Rolling it out

  • Write it down. One page: the parts, their order, the codes you allow. If it does not fit on a page, it is too complicated.
  • Start with everything new. From today, nothing gets created without the convention.
  • Rename the old in batches. A name is a label. Renaming a policy does not change what it does or who it is assigned to, so you can clean up one platform at a time.
  • Make it the easy path. People follow a convention when following it is less work than making a name up, which is what the builder is for.
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