In this section of the course, we're going to talk about device enrollment program and Apple school
manager slash Apple business manager.
The best way to really understand deep or assembly is in the context of how it enables over the air
automation and configuration of your devices.
What device enrollment program, or DEP, which was the legacy name of the service, used to be a stand
alone.
Now it's been integrated into Apple school manager, Apple business manager, depending on whether you're
a school or a business, what it really does is it tracks purchases by your organization and it keeps
a copy or a reference to a particular device, say, an iPad, a Mac, an Apple TV or any device that
can be managed through an MDM solution or Apple configurator.
So it maintains a database of all devices and synchronizes through either Apple configurator or through
your MDE.
The best way to illustrate this would be a diagram that looks something like this, so I'm really using
two different solutions here.
You could just use an MDM or just use the Apple configurator specifically.
You'd want the MDM if you're going to use this with Macintosh devices.
But for iPad and iPad, pro Apple Configurator will work just fine.
So basically what we have is our deep database of all of our purchases, whether those be books, apps,
any other items that we've purchased from a volume purchase perspective, along with all of those devices,
all of our Macs, all of our iPads that have really been purchased probably since, I'd say 2012 or
somewhere on there.
When Apple started doing this that synchronizes back into assembly ABM.
And we'll go through that just a little bit on how Apple school manager and Apple business manager tap
into that deep database and then that would synchronize back down to Apple configurator or over to your
MDM.
And then basically, once you've configured your devices through Apple configurator, when they go to
do their activation, they check in with Assembly ABIM and check to see that there's a record in the
database and then you apply the appropriate settings from an MDM solution.
It's even slicker, the device basically on boards.
And at the time that you go through the setup assistant, it basically will connect back up to Apple
school manager, Apple business manager and check the database and it'll point that device to a specific
MDM.
And then from there, the MDM takes over configuring the device with its mobile device model configuration
profile and sets it up as supervised or whatever you've configured in MDM.
We'll get into more of the MDM stuff in the future.
But I think just for right now, I wanted to explain kind of how this all works together and why ASRM
and EBM and DAP are important concepts to understand as it relates to configuring your devices over
the ER.