Microsoft Intune is excellent at what it was designed to do: manage devices, enforce compliance, and keep your environment secure. But when it comes to application delivery, Company Portal was never built to carry the full load. It’s a basic front-end. And for IT teams managing hundreds or thousands of apps across Windows, macOS, and virtual desktops, basic isn’t enough.
Application Workspace is a modern application delivery solution built to close that gap not by replacing Intune, but by making it more complete.
Application delivery failures: The problem with “pending”
If you’ve managed apps through Company Portal, you know the feeling: A user needs something installed, the request goes in, and then… you wait. Syncs run on Intune’s schedule. Failures surface as generic errors with no clear path forward. Remoting into a device to investigate what went wrong isn’t scalable when you’re managing thousands of endpoints.
Application Workspace uses an agent-based delivery model that bypasses sync delays entirely. Installs typically complete in minutes. When something goes wrong, detailed telemetry shows exactly what happened—who requested it, when it ran, and why it failed—without touching the device.
Speed matters. But so does knowing why something didn’t work.
Day one still breaks
Autopilot enrollment ends. The user logs in. And then the real work starts. You need to manually hunt down apps, wait on policies to apply, and hope the experience resembles what IT intends.
Autopilot’s enrollment status page has real constraints. Install order is hard to control. App-type mixing creates friction. Most teams end up shipping a minimal baseline during enrollment and finishing the rest manually later. That “30-minute back to productive” goal quietly stretches into half a day.
Application Workspace gives you control over which apps land during enrollment and which follow seamlessly at first login, network detection, or any other trigger you define. Installs run continuously and predictably without depending on maintenance windows or manual follow-up.
Users get a complete workspace. IT gets a repeatable process.
One portal for complete application delivery
Company Portal works fine if your users only need Windows apps installed from Intune. But that’s rarely the reality. Many environments mix local apps, web apps, VDI-published sessions, and Cloud PC workloads. Managing those through separate portals creates confusion and drives tickets.
Application Workspace becomes the single front door for all of it. Users see one catalog whether they’re on a laptop, a virtual session, or a Cloud PC. Role- and identity-based entitlements mean each person sees what they’re entitled to, nothing else.
And it doesn’t require retraining users on a new tool. Application Workspace surfaces through the Application Workspace launcher, Software Center, Teams, SharePoint, or the intranet. Meet users where they already work.
Application packaging without the wrapper problem
Complex app installs have always relied on custom scripts and wrapper files. Every new release means reworking those wrappers. Every edge case adds another script to maintain. It’s a scripting shop disguised as an IT function.
Application Workspace replaces that with a visual, task-sequence-style packaging engine. Pre/post actions, conditions, rollback, re-use—all are built in, with no scripting required. Packages promote through a Dev → Test → Acceptance → Production pipeline with approvals and a full audit trail.
For third-party apps, Setup Store covers thousands of curated Windows and macOS titles with managed updates, CVE context, and dependency handling, while preserving your customizations across versions. Set it up once. Let Application Workspace keep it current.
Visibility that actually helps
Company Portal gives you basic deployment status. But when something breaks at scale, that’s not enough. Finding the root cause means digging through device logs, and exceptions mean creating more Entra ID groups to handle targeting edge cases.
Application Workspace gives you near real-time compliance dashboards with centralized logs you can export to Sentinel, Splunk, or other SIEM systems. Targeting goes beyond group membership with user, device, context, or script-based rules giving you the flexibility complex environments require. Also, multi-zone and multi-tenant support means independent app versions can exist on a per-department basis, with governance and audit trails intact.
The bottom line
Intune secures the device. Application Workspace makes applications simple to deliver, easy to govern, and effortless for people to use across Intune, ConfigMgr, VDI, and macOS.
If your team is still fighting sync delays, chasing packaging backlogs, or piecing together a Day 1 experience that never quite lands, Application Workspace is the platform your Intune environment is missing.
See it for yourself in a self-guided tour or book a 30-minute demo.
