Hey everyone,
I was doing some late-night digging through Apple’s deployment docs for an upcoming fleet refresh, and I keep seeing the term Apple Business pop up. We already use ABM with our Hexnode portal to push out apps and zero-touch profiles. Is Apple Business just like ABM, or something else? I even saw a Reddit thread where someone said they manage their entire company fleet with it without a third-party MDM, and now I am in the confusion pit. Can someone pull me out?
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Hey, don’t worry, Apple’s naming conventions can be a total maze sometimes.
What you stumbled across is almost certainly Apple Business Essentials (ABE), which is very different from ABM. Think of Apple Business Manager (ABM) as your foundational layer; it’s just the portal where you register company-owned devices and buy volume licenses for apps. By itself, ABM doesn’t manage devices; it just points them to an MDM like Hexnode.
Apple Business Essentials, on the other hand, is Apple’s own lightweight MDM designed specifically for small businesses (under 500 employees). Since you guys are already using Hexnode, I suggest you could stick with regular ABM.
Ahhh, okay, I was panicking if i had to migrate to some new portal. Phew.
I read that Essentials comes with business iCloud storage bundled in. Our marketing team is constantly complaining about running out of space for their massive project files on their iPads. Is there any way to leverage that Apple Business iCloud storage feature and plug it into our current ABM + Hexnode setup, or is that strictly locked behind the Essentials paywall?
The bundled iCloud storage (along with 24/7 Apple support) is the main selling point of the Essentials subscription, and unfortunately, it is strictly locked behind that specific paywall.
But you aren’t totally out of luck with your current setup! Within your existing ABM portal, you can create Managed Apple IDs for your marketing team. Apple automatically gives every Managed Apple ID 5GB of free iCloud storage.
If they need more than 5GB, though, you hit a bit of a wall. Apple currently doesn’t let you just buy extra iCloud storage blocks in regular ABM for Managed IDs; it’s probably the #1 most requested feature by enterprise admins right now! Most of us get around this by just pushing Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive via Hexnode to handle the heavy project files. It keeps the corporate data secure and saves you from having to completely restructure your MDM setup just for some extra cloud storage!
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