Lack of global DEP availability; how are you handling it?

[brandonpeek]

Hi all,

I'm looking into enrolling our company into the DEP program, but current availability being what it is we've got some things to figure out. At current we leverage a layering approach enrolling the Mac and kicking off a configuration workflow by way of our "compliance package" that installs on top of the native OS.

I'd like to move us away from the compliance package option and towards a touchless DEP-type of enrollment experience. The biggest hurdle so far is lack of DEP in countries like South Africa or India. Has anyone here adopted DEP, but had similar hurdles with lack of availability in some countries where you have offices? If so, how did you solve this, if at all?

My current thought is that we'll have to adopt a hybrid approach of DEP where available and the compliance package where DEP is unavailable, but I'm eager to hear other ideas.

[nessts]

even with DEP don't you need your compliance package to some extent?
All DEP can possibly do is limit what users see during Setup Assistant, possibly connect to a directory service and connect you to your MDM which should be then pushing your compliance policies/pkg down.
The problem with no DEP is that you have to login to the computer first, and you have to disable Setup Assistant completely to keep users out of some part of it if you want accounts to come from AD for instance. So that's the rub, if you have a depot or some sort of deployment team they can install a package in target disk mode on top of the OS and maybe take care of that stuff for you. Or they can boot can go through setup assistant for the users and get it to the right point with the right accounts.

[gachowski]

@brandonpeek

I would like to know too, how people are handling non DEP countries.... I would guess that we are going to move to DEP and I would doubt that Apple will have DEP in all of our locations...

C

[MikeR · Accepted solution]

DEP has some great advantages for the enterprise. In addition to streamlining the activation process, it essentially tying the Mac asset to the company. However, as @brandonpeek observed, it is not available everywhere. Further complicating the process is that moving assets like Macs across borders has tax and licensing implications making it ineffectual -- so it's not like you can buy a DEP enabled device and just ship it to another country.

For all of the above reasons, the hybrid approach is what I would recommend. In the end, the impact to the end user is a slightly more complex activation process, and for the back-office there are implications in terms of process complexity that will likely need to be accounted for.

Also, if you have the ability to control it, I would suggest considering a phased approach where you group the DEP and non-DEP countries together for some efficiency in procurement, deployment and support functions (where DEP really shines). For instance, the Phase 1 rollout might be only DEP-enabled countries, with Phase 2 being the rest of the world.

For more information on DEP (including the countries it's available in), have a look here: http://www.apple.com/business/dep/

As of this post the countries DEP is available in are: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and United States.

Hope this helps...Mike

[brandonpeek]

Thank you for the thoughts on this. Last night I did give some thought to a depot option, but as @MikeR mentions, shipping hardware across international borders is incredibly challenging due to tax, customs, and bond issues that would be encountered. I recently shipped a used Mac from our lab in the US to our team in Germany resulting in a $350 tax our company had to pay before German customs would release the Mac.

I think we'll consider moving forward with the hybrid approach and see how we can implement it in phases. I've been kicking myself for not asking how IBM was addressing this issue in their recent JNUC presentation.

I'm going to mark this as solved, but if anyone has other thoughts on this I am all ears! :)