Apple Business Manager (ABM): My thoughts + VPP Meraki Documentation

PeterJames
Head in the Cloud

Apple Business Manager (ABM): My thoughts + VPP Meraki Documentation

Good Morning,

 

With Apple Business Manager (ABM) now in full swing, could I please request some of the Meraki documentation is updated.

 

Online help for Apple Business Manager can be found here. In short, this replaces the DEP/VPP Account management and allows you more granular control over users who can access the DEP/VPP.

 

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A word of warning however, is this does NOT replace the Apple Push Certificate process. This still remains to be a separate system (located at https://identity.apple.com/pushcert/ ) and yearly renews are required.

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My experience with this has been quite smooth, a couple of things to note:
 - Only the main Admin account of the Apple DEP account can carry this out

 - You do not need to update your DEP or VPP tokens following the update

 - The main Admin becomes the main Admin in Apple Business Manager

 - The secondary Admin's become "People Manager, Device Manager and Content Manager", the only different from this and the main Admin is that only the main Admin can accept new Apple T&C's.

 

The main question I had around this is how do you now update your DEP/VPP certificate tokens yearly. The DEP certificate update is pretty much the same...login -> Click on server; upload/get token.

The VPP however is a little different. First you need to log in to https://business.apple.com and go to 'Apps and Books' and click 'Get Started'; no further action required. After a moment this page will update but (a few times) nothing would be listed here, but if you go to 'Settings' and click on 'Apps and Books' your previous purchases will be listed.

I found logging in/out a few times and going back to 'Apps and Books', this was still blank or was stuck updating. But after a 10-15 minutes I had checked again and all these were now listed.

 

My question now was how do I update my yearly token...The Meraki documentation (Using Apple VPP with Systems Manager)  is a little outdated, but pointed me in the right direction due it to showing Apple School Manager (which is the seed of the Apple Business Manager idea and this is what schools would use instead).But the location in the documentation is is different for Apple Business Manager users.

Anyway...to update your VPP token you need to log in and go to 'Settings', click on 'Apps and Books' and at the bottom on the far right (you may need to scroll down), there is a hidden section called 'My Server Tokens' with a download option.

 

Meraki - Can we please have the Using Apple VPP with Systems Manager documentation updated please.


And I hope this helps anyone else who may be wondering about all this.

Thank you,
Peter James

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