Apple Business Manager is live

[UESCDurandal]

Hey all,

Our AppleCare Enterprise rep has informed me that ABM is now in production, replacing DEP and VPP for businesses. It appears that logging into deploy.apple.com with an Agent account will start the upgrade automatically.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208817

I'm curious if anyone can attest to their upgrade experience. Any speed bumps?

[davidacland]

I'm going to try it tomorrow so will let you know.

Although it won't actually have any real benefit for us above the DEP and VPP features we currently use.

[hkabik]

Keeping an eye on this as well. We have a separate login for our DEP and VPP enrollments, I wonder if we will be able to unify them with this.

[charles_hitch]

Very interested in folks experience upgrading (updating?) to ABM.

[dfarnworth_b]

Think this is US only at present... Availability of Apple programs for education and business

[jsherwood]

It's US only right now but it starts rolling "globally" to 34 countries starting June 20th. On top of that there will be a further 31 countries added over the summer - these are touted to be Bulgaria, Bahrain, Cyprus, Estonia, Iceland, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Qatar, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, South Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru.

[cwaldrip]

It doesn't upgrade automatically, but you're prompted. It took only about 5 minutes (less than 1000 machines in DEP). The new URL is business.apple.com. There's a mechanism to let you invite a VPP user to it. The nicest feature for me was letting us add additional url aliases for accounts. We have multiple email aliases for the multitude of sites we run (any of them will work for email). Really handy since several of our users have already used their primary corporate email for GSX, and couldn't use that for DEP (it only allowed one email address domain). So now bob doesn't have to request a new email alias with the primary corporate email, but can use any of the other domain aliases. That make sense?

[dstranathan]

Just came from an Apple Enterprise briefing with a regional Apple engineer this morning.

My ears perked-up when I discovered ABM now knows the difference between an iOS device and a Mac, and can therefore assign hardware automatically to the correct MDM (should your institute have multiple MDMs like I do). This is one of those "FINALLY!" moments for me.

Granular, role-based admin accounts is a nice addition, too.

Consolidate VPP & DEP into a single service? Bring it on!

[chris_kemp]

We had an issue where, at some point after the upgrade, all of our prestage assignments became unchecked. We have yet to find the smoking gun, but I hear that this isn't unprecedented; and the system started acting weird the same day that we were transitioned from the beta.

One thing to note as well: the unassigned machines apparently contributed to some very bad server behavior, with the CPU spiking to the point of service interruptions. As soon as we reassigned the machines everything calmed down. We're on 10.3.

[pmeuser]

Indeed, if I try to sing-in to https://business.apple.com with my german deployment account, I receive the error message, that the ID would not be eligible for "Apple School Manager". That might change the 20th.

[dstranathan]

I used my DEP account to log in and migrate/upgrade to Apple Business Manager (ABM). Pretty fast and smooth transition.

However, I'm having trouble linking my old VPP account to ABM. There is a link under "Legacy VPP Accounts"
to "Invite VPP Program Facilitator…" But 24-hours later and Apple Business Manager still thinks I have "0 Apps".

[ChrisN]

I just signed up with Apple Business Manager without ever having a VPP/DEP. I'm not finding a way from within Jamf Now to connect ABM with Jamf Now, has anyone figured that out yet?

[dstranathan]

I am running Jamf Pro 10.3.1 which doesn't explicitly mention ABM, but I just got an email from a Jamf rep that ABM is supported.

After merging my old DEP and VPP into ABM, I noticed that a couple VPP apps keep trying to install over and over again on my test Macs. I haven't configured my JSS to use my new ABM account yet - JSS is still using my old VPP account (which appears to still be valid).

I'm with you trying to figure out the JSS account settings for ABM.

[gachowski]

I am thinking about upgrading to ABM after the holidays anybody else have any feedback that I should be worried about? Sounds like it's all good to go?

Thanks

C