Title: Systems Engineer with 8+ years in IT trying to break into Solutions Engineering

Hi everyone,

I’ve spent more than eight years working across desktop support, MSPs, enterprise IT and systems engineering. I’m currently trying to determine the best way to position that customer-side experience for a Solutions Engineer role.

In my current position, I support enterprise applications, Laserfiche and SQL-backed workflows, identity and access management, endpoint environments and PowerShell automation. I work with business stakeholders to understand operational problems, gather requirements, evaluate possible approaches, test changes and explain the proposed solution and tradeoffs.

I also have client-facing consulting experience where I assess technology needs, recommend solutions based on the client’s environment and budget, present different options, implement the selected approach and guide the customer through adoption. Earlier in my career, I delivered product demonstrations and recommendations directly to customers at Apple.

The part of the work I enjoy most is speaking with people, understanding what they are trying to accomplish and figuring out a practical solution. I’m not particularly interested in becoming an IT manager or spending my entire career doing deep coding, so Solutions Engineering feels like a natural direction.

My main gap is that I haven’t worked within a formal SaaS sales cycle or held a presales title.

For those who transitioned from IT or the customer side:

• Does this sound like enough transferable experience to target SE roles directly?
• How did you prove discovery and customer influence during interviews?
• Did your first company teach you the demo, POC and sales-cycle portions?
• Would you target products you previously administered as the easiest entry point?

I’d appreciate any honest feedback from people who have made a similar move.

Hello, need some insight. We are planning a phased migration of roughly 300 Windows users from traditional on-prem AD/domain-joined devices to Microsoft Entra joined + Intune managed devices using Windows Autopilot.

For new devices/users, Autopilot is pretty straightforward. The part I'm trying to plan is our existing users and their Windows profiles.

Our goal is to make the migration as hands-off as possible for the user. Ideally, IT handles the migration in the background or during a scheduled cutover, and when the user signs into the Entra joined device their existing environment is preserved as much as possible.

We want to preserve things such as:

• Desktop/Documents/Pictures
• Browser profile/bookmarks
• Outlook/M365 configuration
• User-specific application settings
• Shortcuts
• Relevant AppData/settings where possible
• Printers/mapped resources where still needed

We are looking at OneDrive Known Folder Move for user data, but obviously KFM doesn't migrate the entire Windows profile.

For same-device migrations, I've been looking at ForensiT User Profile Wizard Corporate Edition to potentially reassociate the existing domain profile with the user's Entra identity. I've also looked into USMT.

For those who have actually done an AD/domain joined → Entra joined + Intune migration at scale:

1. How did you handle existing Windows user profiles?
2. Did you wipe/reprovision devices or convert them in place?
3. Did you use ForensiT, USMT, OneDrive KFM, or another solution?
4. If you used ForensiT, were you able to automate it successfully at scale?
5. What profile data/settings did NOT survive that you expected to?
6. How much user interaction was required?
7. Would you use the same approach again?
8. Any major gotchas with credentials, AppData, Outlook, browser profiles, mapped drives, printers, or application settings?
9. If you had to do ~300 users today, what approach would you use?

The end goal isn't necessarily a perfect 1:1 clone. We're trying to avoid making users manually move files, reinstall applications, or rebuild their working environment after the migration.

I'd especially appreciate experiences from anyone who has done this with existing production users rather than only new Autopilot deployments.

Main Q: After the migration, when the user signed in with their Entra account for the first time, did Windows load their original domain profile directly, or did you still have to manually repair/reconfigure parts of the profile?