Apple @ Work

As we wrap up the decade, one trend has been clear: Apple’s enterprise growth. We heard at JNUC that all Fortune 500 companies are using Apple products. We’re seeing companies build enterprise security tools for macOS. We’re seeing from IBM that their employees who use macOS generally perform better at work as well. It’s been a great decade, and this week, I want to look at Apple’s top ten enterprise (and K-12) innovations.
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Digital signage is everywhere now. From the low-cost pizza place to movie theatres to major sports arenas, it’s everywhere. Rarely do you see signage that has to be manually changed due to the cost of continual updates. For small businesses, digital signage has often been out of reach because of the high initial cost and complexity of deployment (server infrastructure, complicated software, expensive maintenance, etc.). Thanks to the Apple TV, its management APIs, and some cloud-based software, even the smallest retail stores can now have a digital signage solution.
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Apple released Screen Time initially with iOS 12, and it has continued to refine it since. I’ve enjoyed using it as a parent with my children’s iPad as a way to automatically disable their devices after a certain amount of time. Since then, we’ve had various articles looking at how Apple could improve Screen Time. Ben Lovejoy argued that a Screen Time API would allow third-party developers to expand beyond what Apple has built. I mentioned last December that I would love to see some enhanced Safari filtering options, iMessage history, and more. After I attended JNUC 2019, I started wondering what Screen Time for the enterprise might look like if Apple released it.
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One of the most significant changes in enterprise IT over the last decade has been with Software as a Service (SaaS) going from the minority to the expectation. Thanks to frequent (and free) updates of macOS and iOS, developers are having to spend considerable resources on maintaining their apps on top of trying to grow their feature sets. Instead of spending $1500 every time a new version of Adobe Creative Cloud comes out, organizations can have a recurring charge for the number of seats they need and easily monitor expenses. Setapp, the popular all you can eat service for apps, has recently released an enterprise version for businesses that is called Setapp for Teams.
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IT professionals are known for having all of the latest technology products, so they can be hard to buy for during the Christmas season. In my Apple @ Work post for this week, I want to run through a handful of products that would make for an excellent Christmas gift ideas for the IT professionals in your life.
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I’ve been interested in what Apple is doing in the health industry for a while now. I love reading stories about people using Apple Watch to get healthy, prevent accidents, and more. While I was at JNUC this past week, I got to spend some time with Lindsey Koshansky from Locus Health to hear how they are using the iPad in the healthcare field. They are heavily invested in the Apple and Jamf ecosystem, so I was eager to hear more about what they’re doing.
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I’ve heard for years that you shouldn’t use your Mac with administrator privileges. I 100% agree with that statement, and I still use my Mac with administrator privileges. But to be perfectly honest, it’s just sort of inconvenient. In the enterprise, running as an administrator can certainly be against company policy, and depending on what environment you operate in, you may be out of compliance with industry regulations or customer contracts. But thanks to an open source tool (Privileges for macOS) from SAP, Apple focused enterprises now have a great solution. 
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At JNUC 2019, Jeremy Butcher from Apple Product Marketing came on stage to give the Apple community an update on the state of Apple’s enterprise focus. He highlighted that all Fortune 500 companies are using Apple products.
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If you have become an Apple fan in the past decade or so, you are used to yearly operating system updates for free. If you have been a Mac user longer than that, you remember actually paying for OS updates every 18 months or so. I know Halloween is coming up, so I’ll inform you of something even scarier: we had to wait in a line to buy a new version of OS X on a CD. While we’ve gotten used to free OS updates as consumers, it has been a big help to Apple in the enterprise. This week, I want to explain why frequent and free OS updates are a big help for Apple’s growth in the enterprise.
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If you look at Apple’s device lineup over the past few years, the vast majority of them do not have ethernet ports. Wi-Fi has grown across retail centers, sports stadium, universities, K–12 schools, and business centers. One of the major drivers behind the growth of Wi-Fi is Apple’s products.

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Apple @ Work is brought to you by Spike, the world’s first conversational email app that helps professionals and teams spend less time on email, and more on getting things done.

I started working in a corporate environment in 2004. Since then, I’ve watched enterprise communications dramatically change. Back then, we relied on Outlook, desk phones, and the occasional cell phone call. Today, the landscape looks completely different. We still have e-mail, but we’ve also added tools like iMessage, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more. What’s ironic is that I feel overwhelmed at times. I joked with my wife that working in 2019 sometimes feels like keeping inboxes empty. Let’s take a look at the current state of enterprise communication tools.
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Apple @ Work is brought to you by Spike, the world’s first conversational email app that helps professionals and teams spend less time on email, and more on getting things done.

In the enterprise IT market, eliminating variables is an essential part of the job when it comes to troubleshooting. The more variables you have, the more opportunities you have for things to go wrong. By eliminating variables on your network and with your end-user devices, you make it easier to troubleshoot when issues arise. Variables especially cause issues when it comes to major OS upgrades as you have more testing to do. The longer I’ve been in enterprise IT, the more I’ve realized that Apple’s tightly controlled system of hardware and software integration is exactly what IT departments crave. Apple controls every bit of driver updates as part of their OS upgrades, and that helps IT departments be more efficient. While IT departments used to be all in on Windows, we are starting to see that tide shift. Thanks to upgrades in the ability to manage Apple products in mass, and the simplicity of the Apple hardware and software configuration, IT departments are now seeing the value of Apple in the enterprise. Instead of banning Apple devices, IT departments are now recommending them.
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Apple @ Work is brought to you by Spike, the world’s first conversational email app that helps professionals and teams spend less time on email, and more on getting things done.

One of the common things I hear about Mobile Device Management solutions from my technology-focused friends is they hate when their company IT departments “suck” their devices into the management system the organization chooses. For those that love to tinker, set up, and manage their own devices, having them “managed” may seem like big brother is watching. Thankfully, Apple has clear APIs for how their devices interact with MDMs, so end users can rest assured their IT department doesn’t have access to everything on their devices. If you’re wondering if your IT department can read your iMessages, you’ve come to the right place.
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Apple @ Work is brought to you by Spike, the world’s first conversational email app that helps professionals and teams spend less time on email, and more on getting things done.

I still remember when iMessage first launched with iOS 5 in 2011 and OS X Mountain Lion in 2012. In my office, we had (and still have) terrible cell service. Since iMessage worked on Wi-Fi, I could finally send and receive “text messages” with ease. I don’t think we’ve given Apple enough credit for creating such a popular service across their ecosystem. By 2016, Apple announced that 200,000 messages were being sent every second. iMessage, despite its faults, is an excellent service. It provides fast communication to other iOS users and syncs across all of your devices. Over time, I’ve ended up in more group texts than I would have ever imagined. These aren’t just friends who are sending GIFs back and forth. These group messages are various subgroups at my office, where people are communicating about work. The problem with this situation is that iMessage was not built for internal business communications, but Apple could evolve its features to help with this use case in the future. 
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Apple products used to be something IT departments hated to deploy, but that mindset has certainly shifted in recent years. A lot has changed to get us to this point, but one thing was the key enabler to Apple’s growth in the enterprise: web applications. Now, you are probably thinking, why have web apps led to Apple’s growth in the enterprise? Your natural thought process would be that if an organization runs a lot of web applications, they’d want to deploy the cheapest hardware possible. They’d likely be looking at Chromebooks or inexpensive PC laptops. On the other hand, as technology has become more personal, employees have started to demand the tools they feel comfortable with. Thanks to Apple’s strong presence on mobile (iPad and iPhone), users want that same simplicity on their desktop workstations. So why have web applications enabled the adoption of macOS in the enterprise? Let’s look at the factors for how web apps on the Mac led to its enterprise growth.
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Apple @ Work is brought to you by Jamf, the standard in Apple management. Learn more at Jamf.com/9to5mac.

Configuration profiles are a huge part of the mobile device management experience when working with the iPad and the Mac. They are the “building blocks” of how the iPad and Mac know what restrictions or settings to have in place. If you can get the hang of this aspect of using an MDM, you’ll become a master in no time. If you are looking for how to restore a deleted Jamf profile in order to remove it, I’ll cover that at the bottom.
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Apple @ Work is brought to you by Jamf, the standard in Apple management. Learn more at Jamf.com/9to5mac.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at various tips and tricks for mobile device management systems. If you are new to the MDM world, it’s how you manage devices in bulk. Whether you are managing a few or thousands of devices, an MDM solution can be helpful. It allows you to push out deploying devices without even touching them, install configuration policies, and install and manage applications remotely.
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Apple @ Work is brought to you by Jamf, the standard for Apple management.

iPad and Mac deployments come in all shapes and sizes. Apple has built up its deployment tools to help small deployments be able to use management tools without breaking the bank, but also to where they scale up to tens of thousands of devices and IT managers don’t lose control. In this article, I want to discuss smart groups.

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Apple @ Work is brought to you by Jamf, the standard in Apple management. Learn more at Jamf.com/9to5mac.

Many of you know me from my writing here at 9to5Mac. I post a few articles each week that are mainly opinion, but in my day job, I run IT for a school in Chattanooga, TN. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be working through a few tips, tricks, and workflows for best practices with device management for the Apple-focused organization.

Today, I’m happy to say that we’re kicking it off with a brand new webinar on the top mistakes that Apple IT managers make. In this video (below), I work through each mistake and explain why it’s a problem.

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Since March of 2018, I’ve written a weekly column called Making the Grade covering Apple in K-12 education. A lot of the content I’ve wanted to cover has leaned a little into the enterprise (corporate world), so I’ve created a new column called Apple @ Work where I will talk about more enterprise content with how it relates to Apple. I will be moving Making the Grade to every other Saturday, with Apple @ Work publishing on the other Saturday.

In the first installment, I cover the Top 3 mistakes Apple IT managers make including a 25-minute webinar video available now (below).

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