Question for anyone using Apple Business Essentials

[AppleTO]

Apple Business Essentials is currently only available in the US, but I'm hoping it will soon be expanded to Canada. I would likely be able to dump my 3rd party MDM and use Apple Business Manager directly.

But for anyone that uses it and may be able to answer this, how does it handle pre-Apple Silicon and T2 Macs? It's not currently possible to add these Macs to ABM, unless they were purchased from an authorized Apple reseller and automatically added using an Organization ID. Most of our iMacs were purchased long before we even had an Organization ID. Are federated users with managed Apple IDs still able to login to these Macs (and then have their collections applied)? Or are they pretty much useless?

Using out current MDM, these older Macs can still be added manually (with somewhat reduced functionality), but it doesn't look like that's possible in Apple Business Essentials.

If anyone has any knowledge of Apple Business Essentials, any info would be greatly appreciated.

 

[LindzKay]

I haven't used it yet, I was told in the BETA that we should not experiment since we use MacPractice for production medical records. Then, after it went live, so far I'm being told I need a minimum of 50 users by the local Apple store. I'm not sure if this is correct or not. I do have a tip for the devices that you mentioned that are not in Apple Business Manager.
As far as what Apple told me in my "demo" only Apple's with the Intel/T2 chip or later can be entered into the manager. If you purchased your devices elsewhere, or refurbished etc., you download the "Configurator" app from the App store onto your iPhone or iPad. I downloaded it on my iPhone. Next, you manually scan devices into configurator and into the manager. This only works with Monterrey+. I successfully added a refurbished Mac Studio this way.

I hope that helps, this weekend I'm going to call the corp. team and see if this 50 user nonsense if bogus or not, we have 25 at our business.

Good Luck!

 

[AppleTO]

I haven't used it yet, I was told in the BETA that we should not experiment since we use MacPractice for production medical records. Then, after it went live, so far I'm being told I need a minimum of 50 users by the local Apple store. I'm not sure if this is correct or not. I do have a tip for the devices that you mentioned that are not in Apple Business Manager.
As far as what Apple told me in my "demo" only Apple's with the Intel/T2 chip or later can be entered into the manager. If you purchased your devices elsewhere, or refurbished etc., you download the "Configurator" app from the App store onto your iPhone or iPad. I downloaded it on my iPhone. Next, you manually scan devices into configurator and into the manager. This only works with Monterrey+. I successfully added a refurbished Mac Studio this way.

I hope that helps, this weekend I'm going to call the corp. team and see if this 50 user nonsense if bogus or not, we have 25 at our business.

Good Luck!

Thank you very much for your input. I was also not aware of any minimum user limitations. We are only around 35 people.

Before me, the company had no one managing Apple devices so it was basically a free for all. I’ve so far been able to add a few M1 Macs to ABM, as you mentioned, which is good. Unfortunately, our primary machines are still 2017 and 2019 iMacs, neither of which have a T2 chip. Oh well.