Windows Autopilot is a means to automate and preconfigure Windows 10 modern managed Devices without the need for custom OS Images. This enables the customization of the Windows 10 OOBE experience, device enrollment and configuration. The standard means to enable Autopilot is part of the device procurement and factory load process, whereby the hardware OEMs register the device via the Windows Autopilot deployment service. This of course will only work for new devices purchased from the OEMs. Some clients may wish to reuse some existing devices and may have a large number of existing devices capable of running windows 10.
The standard existing device process is to generate an Autopilot hardware hash on the existing devices and do a bulk import into Intune. This hardware hash can only be created on a device that already has Windows 10 installed as the required WindowsAutopilotIntune module is only available on Windows 10. With Windows 7 devices this would result in an impractical two step process to migrate to Windows 10 and use Autopilot.
With Windows 10 1809 Microsoft provided a means to enable Autopilot on existing devices as part of an OS image or OSD deployment process. This gives the ability to migrate from Windows 7 to Windows 10 along with Windows Autopilot in one single step. To perform this a JSON file is created for the required Autopilot profile. During the imaging process after the Windows 10 Operating System has been applied to the device, the Autopilot profile JSON file is applied to the device. Upon restart and OOBE the user is presented with the Autopilot profile experience and after the device enrolls the device is then becomes registered for Autopilot on the clients tenant.
When released with Windows 10 1809 process this only worked for Azure AD devices with no support for Hybrid Azure AD devices. Hybrid Azure AD allows a device to be Azure AD registered and Active Directory domain joined. Microsoft had disabled Hybrid Azure AD due to an enrollment issue. This has now been resolved and the WindowsAutopilotIntune module now supports Hybrid Azure AD profiles.