There is still a way to make it work. But this cant be done by a regular tenant admin. This need to be done by the CSP admin so you need to contact your Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) as they have a special chain of trust with Microsoft. You need to trust this CSP and allow him to be your CSP administrator in your tenant. This prevents any abuse of this process.
Therefore you need also to provide a CSV list to your CSP.
The format must be:
So you need the Device Serial Number, the Manufacturer Name and the Device model.
(Device serial number,Windows product ID,Hardware hash,Manufacturer name,Device model) for copy&paste in your Excel table.
Manufacturer and Device model are very critical. So you can not write what you think of. It need to be the output of this Powershell command:
Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_ComputerSystem -property Manufacturer, Model | Select-Object Manufacturer, Model
Manufacturer Model
------------ -----
Microsoft Corporation Surface Pro 6
You compile the table above with the serial number and these make and model information's (to be very exact is crucial!). The Windows product ID and the Hardwarehash need to be empty!
Then you need to export this as CSV file and hand it over to your CSP for uploading it. This allows you also to on-board machines you have not yet bought as Autopilot machines (with Autopilot hardware vendor SKU and/or Signature Edition)
Additional drawback when not using the signature editon:
You still may have plenty bloatware installations in your image. You may want to remove them manually which might be tricky in some cases.
More information's about Autopilot can be found here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-autopilot/windows-autopilot
More information's about the signature edition can be found here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-gd/store/b/signaturepcs
(dont be shocked. This is only available in Granada English! :-))
