Wwdc on MicroMDM

Tinkering with Declarative Management

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 12:00:00 -0700

Amongst the many announcements at Apple’s WWDC21 was declarative management. I would highly recommend watching the WWDC session “Meet declarative device management” to get a a general idea of what it is and how it works.

I wanted to tinker with the new capabilities and created some initial support for it and wanted to share how you can try this out, too. My hope is that, if you’re inclined, you can get these tools and start playing with it.

Note this is a mostly technical how-to to get up and running and testing Declarative Management with NanoMDM. I hope to write more about the conceptual/paragidm changes DM brings as well more broad thinking in how to implement this protocol in a server. See the bottom for links to further discussion. Also note this is all really early stuff, based on beta software and documentation priovided by Apple and of course is all subject to major breaking changes.

WWDC20: What's new in managing Apple devices

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0500

Here are some of my opinions about Mobile Device Management (MDM) related changes announced last week. SimpleMDM did a great job of summarizing the announcements, so I won’t repeat the same list here. Instead, I’ll focus on a few things which are interesting to me. Before I get into that, I have to mention this isn’t a well-balanced editorial. It’s in my nature to skip over accomplishments and focus on things that still need attention.

Five years behind, Five years ahead

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0500

Apple MDM is over 10 years old today. Initially, MDM was a protocol to manage iPhones, but later expanded to the growing range of Apple devices. MicroMDM started about five years ago, when a few of us in the MacAdmin community became curious about what the MDM could do. We were intrigued by the “zero touch” deployment, which was brand new at the time. Lots of things were different. Almost nobody was using MDM and Apple Business Manager for the Mac.