Manage Edge for macOS the easy way with Microsoft Intune – Settings Catalog

Until now managing the settings for Edge for macOS might be a bit challenging as we need to make use of a custom configuration profile in Microsoft Intune. But this is changed since the first Intune release of 2021. Microsoft released the Settings Catalog profile in Public Preview for macOS and Windows 10. Settings Catalog provides a Settings Picker which makes it very easy to manage our settings direct from the Endpoint Admin Center as I will show in this post. No need to use a configuration file and deploy it with a custom policy. This new profile looks a bit like how we can manage Edge settings for Windows with an Administrative Templates profile already today.

Let`s have a look at how this can be configured and how easy it is to managed Edge settings.

Setup the Settings Catalog profile

We set up a new Settings Catalog configuration profile by using the Endpoint Manager admin center and pick all our settings from here.

• Sign-in to the Endpoint Manager admin center
• Browse to Devices – macOS
• On the Configuration Profiles tab click +Create profile

• Choose Settings Catalog as Profile type
• Click Create

• Give the configuration profile a Name
• Enter a Description (optional)
• Click Next

On the right side of the screen, the Settings Picker is opened. The settings are grouped by category. We can browse through all the available settings via the drop-down lists.

We can also use the search box if we don’t know the exact location of the setting.

After selecting a setting on the right, on the left we can easily pick settings from a drop-down list, enter a value (URL in this example) or flip a switch to set the setting to our required value.
And if we want to remove a setting, click on the undo button on the right of the setting or choose Remove category to remove the complete category.

After we have chosen and configured all our settings, we got a long list of managed settings.

When all settings are configured, finish the setup of the profile by assigning the profile to the security group of choice.

End-user experience

The end-user experience is the same as if we managed the settings with a custom profile. If we take a look at a Mac on which the new policy is applied, we see in the settings menu the Managed By Your Organization stamp.

When we enter EDGE://POLICY in the address bar all managed settings are shown.

Short conclusion

The new Settings Catalog profile is a great way forward and makes managing Edge settings for macOS pretty simple. Most of the settings which can be managed using a custom profile are already added to this profile. The only settings I personally missed until now is the Managed Favorites setting, which I described in a previous post. New settings for Edge will be added in a near future, so if you now miss a setting, big chance it will be added soon.

Thank you for reading ad happy testing!