Adding Windows Devices | JumpCloud University Tutorial (2021)

In this tutorial, we’re going to cover to add Windows devices to JumpCloud by installing the JumpCloud Agent.

To start, log into the JumpCloud Admin portal. In the menu, under the “Device management” section, click “devices”. You’ll be able to view the many different devices that are within your organization within this Menu.

JumpCloud’s Directory Platform is entirely Vendor agnostic, meaning that we can work with Linux, Mac, and Windows Machines.

In this tutorial, we’ll be focusing on adding a Windows device to this Demo Organization.

To add a new device, log into the JumpCloud Admin portal from the new device, navigate to the Device Management Section, click the Devices Menu, then click the green “+” button in the top left side, and select the operating system.

If you’re in a remote environment and you do not have access to the device, end users can install the agent themselves through the User Portal. Check out the tutorial on remote agent installation for more information.

In the new slide out panel on the right, click “Download Agent” to download JumpCloud’s Windows Agent.

You’ll also see a Connect Key in this menu as well. This Connect Key is a unique key that is required during install in order to add the new Windows device to your JumpCloud Organization.

There are several methods of installation. In this module, we’ll be covering the Manual Install.

The JumpCloud Agent will only run on Windows devices that are currently in a non-domain-bound LocalWorkgroup. With JumpCloud you will also have the ability to take over pre-existing Windows Accounts thus enforcing a User’s JumpCloud Password on their Windows device.

For this demonstration, we’ll be using a Windows 10 Pro VM with the hostname BFAY-001. This device has a single local user account, Bob Fay, with Administrative privileges. We’ll go through the manual install along with binding Bob’s JumpCloud Account to this Windows device, thus taking over Bob’s Local Account and enforcing his JumpCloud Password on his Windows device.

To get started, you’ll need to log into the machine as a Local Administrator. In this use case, there is no current directory and Bob Fay’s account is the sole and only user on his Machine. Bob’s current Password is BobFay123!

Navigating to the Folder which contains the install, run the JumpCloud Agent Install.

Click next until you get to the Connect Key input screen.

Copy your Connect Key from your JumpCloud Organization into the Connect Key field and hit Next.

This will authorize the Connect Key with JumpCloud and begin to add this Windows device into JumpCloud. This process can take up to about 2 minutes.

Once the device is added as a new Active device within JumpCloud, the Agent reaches out to JumpCloud for any updates in a 60-second cadence. Meaning that any change to the device or its associations will be automatically updated within 60 seconds.

We can now see that the device BFAY-001 has been successfully added. By clicking on the device, we can pull up some of the device’s information such as: Hostname; Network Adapter Address; External IP Address; Agent Version; Serial Numbers; Full Disk Encryption Status; and much more.

To bind Bob’s JumpCloud User Account to this new JumpCloud device, we need to take over the pre-existing local account for Bob.

When binding JumpCloud Users to JumpCloud devices, account takeover will only occur if the username of the Local Windows Account matches the JumpCloud User’s username configuration. Otherwise, a new Local Windows Account is provisioned on the device.

If the device’s local username does not match what is stored within JumpCloud, you can create a unique system username in the JumpCloud User Account, via the system username attribute in the Details pane of the JumpCloud User in question.

To bind Bob Fay’s JumpCloud user account to his JumpCloud device, click on the device within the device List, click on the Users Tab, and search or select the user you’d like to bind to the device.

You can also promote or demote a user’s privileges. Since Bob Fay is currently an Administrator on his Windows Machine, we’re going to demote him to a Standard User with no Admin rights.

Click Save User. Within 60 seconds of hitting save the following will happen:

Jumping back to the Windows device, we can see that Bob was not logged out or forced out of his current session. It is only upon the next password query that he’ll have to type in the new JumpCloud Password, such as either a lock screen, log off / log in, or a reboot.

Check out JumpCloud’s knowledge base article(s) for more information about managing Linux devices: https://jumpcloud.com/university

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