I’m a bit late in posting this, but better late than never! In this episode, we interview the venerable Arek Dreyer about his upcoming book, and learn a little of his origin story! More on that in issues to come I’m sure!
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AppConfig.org, A Standardization Community For MDMs
When building an MDM, you look for a lot of workflows to make the lives of end users easier. One of those is Managed App Config, which is a technology from Apple that allows an MDM to inject information into an app when the app is sent to a device. Because all apps are different, it’s up to the application developer to build in support both for the feature itself, as well as for any variables they’d like to make possible for an MDM to send to an app. For example, an app might make server and username available, so that when a user opens the app, they need only…
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A quick list of iOS Functionality Restrictions
There are a lot of payloads that MDM and profiles can manage in iOS. Restrictions are probably the one I get the most questions about. And most are pretty self-explanatory. Sooooo, rather than open Profile Manager every time I need to see the list, here it is: Allow use of Camera Allow FaceTime Allow screenshots and screen recording Allow AirDrop (supervised only) Allow iMessage (supervised only) Allow voice dialing while device is locked Allow Siri Allow Siri while device is locked Enable Siri profanity filter (supervised only) Allow user-generated content in Siri (supervised only) Allow iBooks Store (supervised only) Allow installing apps using Apple Configurator and iTunes Allow installing apps…
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Blueprints and Bushel
Bushel shipping a new feature this week call Blueprints. Blueprints are similar to groups, and allow you to assign different options in Bushel to different devices that have a blueprint assigned to them. This also allows you to define one device per blueprint and therefore have different options for different computers. Pretty cool on a few different fronts. And it provides a lot of flexibility for some really, really cool new features we’ve planned for the product. For more on this great new feature, check out this great article from the new Bushel Product Manager, Michael Devins.
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Apple Configurator 2 Guide
Apple Configurator 2 is a great new evolution in iOS initial and configuration management. And there are lots of great options. And to help you wrap your head around all this new fun stuff, I’ve written up a quick and dirty guide for using Apple Configurator 2. It’s not completely done, but it will be shortly. Hope this help someone. Enjoy!
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Screen Real Estate And The Beauty Of Web Clips On iOS
The new iPad Pro is pretty much the most ridiculously luxurious device I’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s huge. There are still many of the same limitations as on an iPad. The lack of browser plug-ins keeps us from accessing certain types of content. There isn’t access to the Finder as with OS X. But the screen is ridiculously massive and provides a whole new way to view data. It’s a beautiful, marvelous piece of technology. When we were looking at Bushel and the blog on on it, we suddenly found the top and bottom bars of Safari to be just a bit too much lost screen real estate. And it made me…
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Device Management Requirements for Financial Services In Small Businesses
Financial services is an interesting business when it comes to what you need to do to meet your regulatory requirements. With so much data and the services that enable you to access data moving to the cloud, it can be hard to keep up with how solutions meet any regulatory requirements you might have. At the end of the day, you’re primarily concerned about customer data leaking out of your environment and making sure that you can report on every single thing that happened in an environment. Whatever help we can provide in this article, make sure that you vet anything against what the individuals that review your regulatory requirements say. Click Here…
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Using Apple Configurator 2 Blueprints to Manage iOS Devices
Blueprints are a new option in Apple Configurator 2. Blueprints allow you setup a template of settings, options, apps, and restore data, and then apply those Blueprints on iOS devices. For example, if you have 1,000 iOS devices, you can create a Blueprint with a restore item, an enrollment profile, a default wallpaper, skip all of the activation steps, install 4 apps, and then enabling encrypted backups. The Blueprint will provide all of these features to any device that the Blueprint is applied to. But then why not call it a group? Why call it a Blueprint? Because the word template is boring. And you’re not dynamically making changes to devices over…
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Bushel, Privacy, and Users
A common question we get in the media is whether or not an employer can look at email on an employees device. The answer is that an employer cannot use Bushel to see mail or content on a device. This isn’t to say that you can’t use your Exchange, Office 365, or Google Apps administrative accounts to view your email. But Bushel doesn’t have anything to do with that. Read More About Bushel, Privacy, And Your Users on the Bushel Blog Here
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Article on Small Business IT on CBS Pulse for Small Business
Posted an article on the As through Zs on managing IT in the small business at CBS Pulse at http://cbspulse.com/2015/10/09/a-through-z-managing-smb-it/. This is another of the small business articles I’ve been working on for Bushel. Expect more! And if you’re into this kind of thing specifically, let me know if there are any cool topics you’d like me to cover!