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Apple Business

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231–240 of 461 posts

Re: Apple Business

#231

Post by czscout »

meego wrote: post #77

I recently tried setting Apple Business Manager for our ≈20 people SME. The first step was "Domain Lock/Capture" which takes over all Apple accounts for a specific domain. I've never had a worse experience from Apple. The process is buggy, filled with foot-guns and dead ends. It expects huge amounts of work from users who have had their account for more than a few weeks and are expected to remove a lot of their perso…

Yes, as an IT professional at a company where a few people have insisted on using Macs, the ABM workflow is by far the most frustrating, half baked product I've had the displeasure of using. People love to complain about Entra/Azure AD, but ABM is another level of obtuse.

Re: Apple Business

#233

Post by 9dev »

Someone1234 wrote: post #76
SamuelAdams wrote: post #26

So do enterprises still need Jamf [1]? For context, Jamf is one of the most common MDM tools for organizations. [1]: https://www.jamf.com/

Yep. People who have never tried to add Mac support to an existing organization do not realize how freaking expensive it is. There are basically two cases. If you use Microsoft, you are often already paying for Entra ID and Intune, then still adding the Apple-side pieces for Mac support: Apple Business Manager and often Jamf or Kandji. If you do not use Microsoft, you are buying the full stack yourself: Okta or JumpC…

Actually Intune handles MacOS reasonably well, you don’t need Jamf; that’s the way we went, and it’s okay-ish for the most part. By far the annoyingest thing is getting Macs bought before we went down the Business Manager integration route into MDM.

You think there’s a standard way to do that? Just install company portal? That worked in exactly 1/20 cases. It’s an exciting new error on every single device. Awful. Just awful.

Re: Apple Business

#234

Post by jillesvangurp »

meego wrote: post #77

I recently tried setting Apple Business Manager for our ≈20 people SME. The first step was "Domain Lock/Capture" which takes over all Apple accounts for a specific domain. I've never had a worse experience from Apple. The process is buggy, filled with foot-guns and dead ends. It expects huge amounts of work from users who have had their account for more than a few weeks and are expected to remove a lot of their perso…

Same here, I never even got in. I never managed to get in. My account is good enough to take my money for other things but somehow I can't manage to onboard into the damn thing so that I can actually manage devices for my company. I just gave up in the end. Couldn't get it done.

I'll try again next month see how far I get with this. This needs to be way simpler than it currently is. Hopefully they fixed a few things there.

Re: Apple Business

#235

Post by drnick1 »

dangus wrote: post #99
999900000999 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*499$ with an EDU discount which definitely means they have margin for business deals. Revenge of the Mac. Theirs simply no reason for any normal person to buy anything else. The year of Linux is deferred yet again.

I keep shouting from the rooftops the fact that the Neo is really not that disruptive or even necessarily that good of a deal. Like, have any of you actually looked at street prices at Micro Center or Best Buy recently? In the price range of the higher model Neo you can get a Yoga 7 with an OLED convertible touch screen, 1TB storage, 16GB of RAM, along with a processor with better multicore and iGPU performance (Ryze…

> Hell, the older generation HP EliteBook 840 G10 that Micro Center sells as a business laptop makes a bunch more sense in a lot of ways.

And the best thing is that you can format the drive, install Linux, and be completely free of Microsoft and Apple.

Re: Apple Business

#236

Post by keerthiko »

dlg wrote: post #218
razakel wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up when it wanted a Dun and Bradstreet number (whoever they are) and the website to get one didn't work.

I have had the misfortune of having to get D&B numbers (for various Apple things). I believe is the source for lead lists where you start to get dozens to text and phone spam calls per day. Do not pay hundreds of dollars for this if you can at all avoid it.

Definitely avoid unless you are distributing a consumer application through the dominant app stores (App Store and Google Play) ~globally, in which case you may not be able to avoid (or avoiding will be just as much work).

Google and Apple require it for lots of mobile apps targeting certain consumer segments because some countries (eg: Brazil, IIRC? don't quote me on that) have chosen to use D&B as a qualified unique identifier of business legitimacy and it requires exposing personal information of your company's leadership to them.

Re: Apple Business

#237

Post by anxman »

wpm wrote: post #197
cocoflunchy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently in that hellish process too... I don't know how to get out of it. Did you know that your employees will be forbidden from downloading from the App store once you launched that migration? It's a nightmare

Well yeah, the idea is that if you have ABM, you have an MDM you can use to purchase licenses for them and install the apps with the MDM.

This was a big pain in the ass for me to figure out. I ended up using the free version of Mosyle and hiring someone on Fiverr to help me figure out how to get the licenses assigned to our managed devices.

Re: Apple Business

#239

Post by Waterluvian »

gowld wrote: post #180
dfabulich wrote: post #97

Strategically, Apple's not setting themselves up for success here by giving Apple Business away for free (with paid per-user storage bumps). As a lot of people on this thread have pointed out, Apple's Business Manager needs a lot of improvements. ("Bring your own device" support is terrible, for example. Changing business names requires a perilous migration step. Support reps don't have the tools to fix serious issue…

Who would pay them for it before "developers fixed their stuff"?

The way it works is that Apple would have committed more resources if the projected outcome was more revenue. By choosing to approach it as a free option, they committed a free option's worth of resourcing to it.

Re: Apple Business

#240

Post by drnick1 »

Out of curiosity, why would any business with an IT department choose this over an in-house solution built from standard open source components. Think email server on premises or in the cloud using postfix/dovecot/LDAP, maybe Nextcloud with OnlyOffice, Jitsi as a Zoom substitute, etc. These are all mature solutions that are free of vendor lock-in, and can be easily managed by any competent IT team.
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