Thoughts on Apple Business Essentials
As a JAMF Admin I find this product offering VERY interesting. I think that this serves a great niche below JAMF with its 1–500 employee offering. JAMF can be a pretty big lift for any company to get into, especially if they do not have somebody that they can dedicate to it. I’ve been spending a lot of my free time over the last year building out our instance of JAMF.
I think it’s a good thing that Apple’s Business Essentials is starting off with the essentials that JAMF does not cover that well: Users and Data backup. I feel like providing email and work chat is probably a mountain that Apple does not want to climb right now, Microsoft, Google, and Slack seem to have that nailed right now. I think iCloud Documents + Desktop and user provisioning is a great start though, that’s what most smart businesses need help with more than email + work chat. Most people are used to using Microsoft Office365, Google Apps or Slack/Discord so I think most people can figure that one out on their own.
The integration with AppleCare support is going to be a big boon to small businesses as well, I can see this being another big selling point for the service. Swapping out laptop hardware is still some of the most time-consuming parts of IT’s jobs. It can take hours, sometimes days for people to get 100% moved over to the new hardware. If it can be made as easy to giving somebody a new laptop, them logging in, and getting all of their apps and data back I consider this to be a huge win. Setting up something like this in JAMF is a BIG lift, even for larger organizations.
App deployment should also big a huge time saver, this is one of the best things about JAMF. Its looking like to me that its only going to be Mac App Store apps though. That could be a gotcha for some organizations, but I think for a lot of smaller businesses under 100 people this will be an OK limitation for a launch. I hope that they have an official packaging method coming down the road, that would also benefit JAMF and Intune users. JAMF Composer is OK, but can be pretty hacky at times with you having to spend a lot of time in the JAMF forums getting something to work.
Overall, I think its a good package. If I were a small business IT consultant or working in a start-up, I would advise my customers to consider starting off with this solution when it comes out of beta. If your business runs primarily off Macs, iPads, and iPhones, it looks like a fantastic solution to streamline your operations. Hardware can always be replaced, but time and data is always the most critical things that you cannot get back if that is lost. If that’s your goal, I think Apple Business Essentials may be a product worth considering. I’m looking forward to seeing if businesses take it up and how it evolves.
