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Apple Business

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Re: Apple Business

#371

Post by wolvoleo »

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…

It's completely impossible for a 60k employee shop too yeah. They also want you to rearrange the azure ad the way Apple wants. Also impossible for us.

And we have like 20k or so users with manually created Apple IDs on their company email and every one of them has to be manually resolved. It's a joke.

Re: Apple Business

#372

Post by wolvoleo »

ghaff wrote: post #364
jazzyjackson wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve never been issued a work computer that’s not yours to fuck around with?

I haven’t. Did have issued laptops that were company managed but I basically didn’t use and, in any case, I like many others reinstalled a clean operating system image and did my own support.

You could do that in our place but you'd lose access to everything due to not being in compliance.

In a small shop that might work but not in an enterprise with ISO norms and security certifications to meet.

Re: Apple Business

#373

Post by wolvoleo »

jamiecurle wrote: post #299
IrishTechie wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The baffling thing is that iOS+MDM has been fantastic over the years. macOS is a completely different beast though.

MacOS used to be excellent for a short period of time when Fleetsmith existed. Then Apple purchased Fleetsmith around 2020 and killed the product not long after. Fortunately around the same time, JamF ended the practice of the mandatory Jamf JumpStart (£5K fee), which finally made Jamf a feasible option for the company I was in at the time.

True, I remember looking at jamf at one point and the mandatory consulting was so annoying because we already had it dialled in on the free trial.

In the end we just made do with intune. It's a lot less capable for Mac but these days you can get by with it.

Re: Apple Business

#374

Post by wolvoleo »

Foivos wrote: post #169
selectively wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft offers Office for Mac. It's a thing they do. It's the full fledged Office suite. They see a Mac user the same way they see a Windows user - a source of revenue.

Office for Mac is increasingly getting feature parity with the windows version, but it is not fully there yet. For example, if you want to use "data model" in Excel, it is only available in the windows version.

Yeah and ms access is completely missing. It lacks the full version of onenote too.

The one thing that shines is Mac outlook where on windows you'll soon have to put up with that joke of a web app.

Re: Apple Business

#375

Post by AdamN »

geoffharcourt wrote: post #86
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…

The domain lock process was an absolute fiasco at our company. I think this could work if you did this at the time your company launched, but the moment you have employees who have Apple IDs tied to their work email that aren't from the Business Essentials system you are stuck in an impossible-to-mange place. There are several cheap MDM solutions for Apple devices that I would rather pay for than be dependent on this…

That's why Enterprise vendors try so hard to get startups using their stuff. Lock-in is so strong. I can't imagine having a working system at a 100 person company and then trying to migrate to something else unless the current situation was truly awful.

Re: Apple Business

#376

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #290

I read the first page of text of Apple's announcement, and still have absolutely zero idea what "Apple Business" is, apart from the fact that it will "manage devices" and "configure employee groups". Since I have no employees and my devices are under control, I guess it's not for me, whatever it is.

It's a way to manage a fleet of corporate workstations, and some other things that businesses with lots of people on laptops end up needing.

Re: Apple Business

#377

Post by pavlov »

lynx97 wrote: post #367
jazzyjackson wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve never been issued a work computer that’s not yours to fuck around with?

I was talking about domain capture. If you own my apple ID just because I used the company email to register it, I will definitely consider sueing you.

Sue for what? Do you think you own the company email address?

Re: Apple Business

#378

Post by bacheaul »

ghaff wrote: post #364
jazzyjackson wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve never been issued a work computer that’s not yours to fuck around with?

I haven’t. Did have issued laptops that were company managed but I basically didn’t use and, in any case, I like many others reinstalled a clean operating system image and did my own support.

At most decent sized companies with a cyber security and network admin team, this is probably the fastest way to get disconnected from the internal corporate network with no way to reconnect.

Re: Apple Business

#379

Post by pjc50 »

weslleyskah wrote: post #323
legitster wrote: post #254

This announcement is pretty sad. If you're wondering why Apple is an IT department nightmare, this announcement is more of a confession. Today your corporate MacBook can have ... preinstalled software! And user groups (for the Apple store and iCloud). Wait, there's more! > In addition, customers can now set up business email, calendar, and directory services with their own domain name for seamless and elevated commun…

Why people bother with all of this to lock the environment into some kind of corporate nightmare? Why not allow some freedom for the worker. I don't see the appeal, it feels like a claustrophobic cage

Single-sign-on is actually useful.

Most of the rest of this stuff .. well, who is responsible if the laptop is compromised?

Re: Apple Business

#380

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> Be warned.

This is exactly what I would have expected from an Apple "business" offering. Apple's whole shtick is to take away most of your choices so that they can focus on the limited number of things they still allow you to do. Businesses need the opposite of that.

Businesses will show up needing integrations with multiple existing third party (often legacy) systems with inherent complexity and then want something that allows them to manage that complexity since it can't be eliminated. It's not really possible in that context to have the experience people otherwise expect Apple to provide, and the thing Apple normally does will often make it worse by removing choices you may have needed in order to make interaction with a third party system less of a pain.

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