Managing Apple devices in the enterprise is something I think a lot about, so I am always happy to learn about new companies who are doing interesting things in this space. A somewhat new player in this space is Fleetsmith. They’re a cloud-based MDM provider that focuses on macOS, tvOS, and iOS. They’ve got some interesting features that I am excited to explore further.
G-Suite and Office 365 Integration
With the recent news about Google’s LDAP feature coming soon, the idea of a hosted identity management system is coming to a reality. Fleetsmith offers 1-click sign up using your G-Suite or Office 365 account. Once your account is set up, you can import your directory which makes it easy to assign devices to users in the system. It can also help auto-populate a local account on macOS (using the same username, but the password isn’t synced).
New Dashboard and Audit Log
They’ve just announced a new dashboard to give IT administrators some great insights. It can show you users that haven’t enrolled their devices, which devices aren’t using disk encryption, current OS version, and hardware health (dead batteries, full hard drives, etc.).
They’ve also just announced a new audit log feature that is coming soon. Fleetsmith’s audit log will provide an audit trail for actions taken on devices. CIOs and IT Managers will be able to see which administrator performed what operation. Companies with an extreme focus on security (healthcare, banking, etc.) will be able to quickly show this information internally and externally (for audits).
The audit log will include:
- Actions that were taken and a description of what was done
- Who made that change
- When the action happened
I am just getting up to speed on Fleetsmith, but they are doing some interesting things in the Apple device management space, so I am looking forward to spending more time with them.
