
It tends to signal that Microsoft will stop supporting a product they've invested in. Many organizations use SCCM, though, and they likely get spooked when words like "legacy" get used by Microsoft to describe any Microsoft product. Microsoft has been pushing Intune and modern management for devices for several years, but it typically has suggested that organizations have a choice with SCCM's co-management feature. Microsoft's article isn't that controversial, but it likely did elicit fears that SCCM won't get supported as a product in the near future for Microsoft's customers. Co-management use by Microsoft will decline to "10 percent by July 2023" and will "naturally dwindle to zero," the pulled article stated.

However, "the use of SCCM co-management agent has been largely deprioritized" at Microsoft, the pulled article indicated. Co-management lets organizations use Intune for some devices from within the SCCM interface. Microsoft had been using the co-management feature in SCCM for managing employee devices. "Now we have that parity," said Senthil Selvaraj, principal program manager for Microsoft Digital, regarding Intune's capabilities, in the pulled article. However, those limitations changed "in late 2020." Intune also hadn't been designed to scale operations. Initially, Intune lacked some of SCCM's capabilities.

The switch to using Intune was a gradual change for Microsoft. These images involved "files of 30GB or more," which took hours to download to employee machines, the pulled article explained. Microsoft's switch to using Microsoft Intune also meant that it could dispense with "building and maintaining images," which it had to do using SCCM "on a monthly basis." That kind of requirement is increasingly unviable in the current and future remote work world. The legacy System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) required that any new device being added to the network had to be joined on-premises through a hardwired ethernet connection.
