Managing iOS devices at work

Is anyone here the manager of the iOS devices in their workplace and willing to impart some wisdom on me?

We have a number of iPhones and iPads and up until now they’ve been issued to staff all with the same iCloud login. As a result, iMessage is turned off so they don’t get each other’s texts.

This doesn’t seem right to me.

As the only Mabook Pro user, and apparent Apple guy, I’ve been given the task to come up with a better way. Yay me :roll_eyes:

I’ve had a look at Configurator and it looks ok for making blueprints for default device configurations, but I can’t understand it enough to work out how staff can use their own iCloud logins. I’m not even sure if Configurator is the right tool.

And advice would be very much appreciated. I’m flying blind and I don’t know what I’m doing.

How many employees are we talking about here?

This is what you should be telling management.

There’s no hierarchy like that, it’s one director and 6 staff. If something needs doing and nobody knows how it gets delegated to a person to learn it best they can. The director already knows, we know as much as each other.

See? Now that we know you have 7 total employees, we won’t be recommending some overkill MDM solution designed for hundreds of employees.

Question time: what do they achieve by having the one iCloud login across all phones?
i.e. why was this done? to share iCloud drive? Photos?
So they could just install the same apps without re-purchasing them?

Basically what I’m asking is: what are you looking to achieve?

Yes, I believe the primary reason is so apps don’t need to be purchased multiple times, but also so they can be tracked centrally with find my iphone.

Each issued device has the same apps on it and gets certain things turned on (like find my iPhone) and off (like iMessage).

The issues that need solving are making the deployment simpler and disabling the ability to purchase new apps on certain staff’s devices. I’m thinking Configurator might be able to do this, but it’s confusing and I’m not even sure if I’m on the right track considering it.

The other thing I’d like to see if possible is for staff to be able to use their own iCloud logins so they can add their own apps and use their own iMessage if they want. I don’t even know if this is possible. If they sign out of the office iCloud then they’d need the password, or someone who has the password, to log back in.

It’s about finding a level of control without being oppressive where we don’t have to be.

As a freelance business technology consultant there are many things I could say, but I’ll start with this: “tell your boss to get an expert” :wink:

(It’s not your job, right? Your boss needs to realise that technology is not like picking up stationary from office works - it’s core to the business and should be considered in connection with all the other business processes.)

Can’t you use one Apple ID for the AppStore, and a different one for iMessage/FaceTime? So you use the company one for the App Store and each person has a personal one for iMessage across iPad and iPhone if they have one. Surely that’s possible.