Dieter Kempeneers

Microsoft released Windows 365 Frontline Shared (FLS) as public preview. It’s a new no-nonsense way to do non-persistent VDI on a Cloud PC. Let me offer you a complete guide on how to the setup. Spoiler alert: it’s quick and straightforward! If you’ve dealt with non-persistent VDI before, you know how complex these setups can be. With Frontline Shared, that complexity is a thing of the past.

If you’re unfamiliar with Frontline Shared, I recommend reading my other post first.

As from April 2nd 2025, Frontline Shared is general available.

Requirements for Frontline Shared

To use Windows 365 Frontline, you’ll need the same Windows 365 Frontline license you may already have. There’s no difference in licensing compared to the regular Windows 365 Frontline.

Additionally, an Intune license is required, but nothing else changes. The process is identical to what you’re used to with Windows 365 Enterprise or Frontline Dedicated.

Create a Provisioning policy

For Windows 365 everything starts within the Intune portal. Navigate to the Windows 365 blade and create a new provisioning policy. you’ll now notice that Frontline now has a breakdown between two modes, Dedicated and Shared. Dedicated is now the new name for the traditional Frontline which we all know by know.

Choose Shared, to make use of the new Non-Persistent feature. Non-Persistence is unique to Frontline Shared and cannot be used any other mode.

If your Cloud PCs don’t show up in the Windows app, ensure you’re using the latest version of the application.

Select an Image

The image options are exactly the same as those available with Frontline Dedicated and Enterprise. Choose the image you prefer; I recommend selecting the gallery image.

Choose the right Configuration

The same goes for Language & Region, choose a language in which you want to provision the Cloud PC.

Naming convention is a little different. For Shared you only have the ability to choose the first 5 pre-fix characters. Since a FLS Cloud PC isn’t tied to a user, it won’t include personal details like parts of a username.

Select Scope tags

Use scope tags if required.

Now about Assignments

Assignments in Frontline Shared work slightly different compared to the enterprise or dedicated mode.

Friendly name support is here!

Selecting the group will require one additional step, you must select the Cloud PC size and provide a friendly name. The friendly name is something new and something which we all have been waiting for. Gone are the times where users will see the name of a provisioning policy that tells them nothing. You can now customize the name they will see on their card within the Windows app. Be sure to think this through, as Frontline Shared is a SHARED model. Users won’t be able to rename the Cloud PC.

A dialog will prompt you to define the size of your Cloud PC pool. The pool size can be as large as the remaining number of Frontline licenses. For example, with five licenses, you can spread them across multiple assignments. But you’ll need to manually allocate the number of Cloud PCs per pool.

That’s it. Your Cloud PCs are now provisioning, and you can assign users to the group you specified. Keep in mind, if you’re assigning applications or policies, they must be assigned to a device group rather than a user group. (More details on this below.)

In the Windows App the user will now see a desktop with the Frontline Shared label.

Now that the setup is complete, there are a few other things to consider. Shared Cloud PCs might require a different configuration compared to regular Cloud PCs or physical devices.

User settings are not supported

In the device details of an FLS Cloud PC, you won’t see a primary user listed. This is because Shared Cloud PCs are designed for multiple users. As a result, settings need to be scoped to the device to ensure they are applied whenever a user logs in. To support this, Frontline Shared introduces a new device model which you can use in Dynamic Groups. As usual, you can still create dynamic groups based on the name of the Provisioning Policy as well.

You can also add a filter to the All Cloud PCs view. This allows you to filter on Frontline Type to only show the Dedicated or Shared Cloud PCs.

Dynamic Groups and Filters make your life easy

Create a Frontline shared filter

It’s also easy to create a filter and dynamic groups within Intune. You can do that from tenant admin. If you want to create a filter that will filter all Frontline Shared Cloud PCs just use the following query.

(device.model -startsWith "Cloud PC Frontline Shared")

This will look like:

Create a Frontline Shared dynamic group to target a provisioning policy

If you are looking to create Dynamic Group, I recommend to scope on the provisioning policy name. A provisioning policy used for Frontline Shared will only consist of Frontline Share Cloud PCs. Your query for your dynamic Group would look like this. Replace FRONTLINESHARED with the name of your provisioning policy. This gives you the option to target settings to different provisioning policies.

(device.enrollmentProfileName -eq "FRONTLINESHARED")

Create a Frontline Shared dynamic group to target all Frontline Shared Cloud PCs

If you’re looking to create a single dynamic group containing all your Frontline Shared Cloud PCs and want to apply for example settings like the idle and disconnect timeout settings across multiple provisioning policies, you can do so easily with the dynamic group querry below.

(device.deviceModel -startsWith "Cloud PC Frontline Shared")

Other things you should do as well

The setup is complete but don’t forget to do these extra things before you push your Cloud PCs to production.

Set Idle and Disconnect timeouts

Active sessions will prevent other users from connection to the Cloud PC. This can prevent other users from doing their work if there are no more Cloud PCs available. You can solve this by settings Idle timeout using Intune. Make sure to scope the policy on the dynamic group created earlier or use the filter.

Create a new configuration profile and select Windows 10 and later as the platform and Settings Catalog as the profile type. Name your policy and select the setting.

Search for disconnect to find the disconnect timer.

Now simply define the threshold and configure the assignment.

If you want to use this setting on all Frontline Shared Cloud PC, simply select “All Devices” and include on the Frontline Shared filter created earlier or assign one of the dynamic groups we created earlier.

Disable the edge first run experience

A webbrowser is often involved as part of any job. Because FLS is non-persistent it is recommended to disable the First Run Experience from Microsoft Edge.

Again, create a settings catalog configuration profile and search for splash. You’ll easy find the required setting.

Just enable the setting and your good to go. You can use the same filter again during the assignment.

Reporting on Cloud PC usage

Predicting the ideal number of Cloud PCs for your users can be challenging. For this reason Microsoft included additional reports and alerts that you can use. In the Intune Reports blade you’ll know find a “Concurrent Frontline Cloud PC connections” report. This will show you if you are about to hit your concurrency limit.

As a next step, consider setting up an automatic email notification for when users cannot connect to a Cloud PC. To do this, go to Tenant Admin, select Alerts, and configure the “Frontline Cloud PCs Near Concurrency Limit” alert. This makes sure you receive an email when the concurrency limit is reached.

If you hit the limit you’ll receive an email like this:

That’s it. You are now ready to push your Cloud PC setup to production. Let me know in the comments what you think about Frontline Shared. If you have any other questions, post them there as well. I hope that you enjoyed this guide on the non-persistent Frontline Shared and that you can put it to good use.

Things not supported by Frontline Shared

There are some things that are not supported by Frontline shared as FLS has another target audience:

• Users can’t have local admin rights
• User settings are not supported. –> VERY IMPORTANT, it might be hit and mis
• Restore points normally included in Windows 365 are not supported, as there is no need for them with non-persistence
• Resizing a FLS Cloud PC won’t work