u/Delicious-Leg1641

Hi all,

New-ish Mac sysadmin here. I work for a company that supports field staff who work in potentially dangerous roles. They use iPads, and before I arrived, a Find My system using individual Apple accounts had been loosely set up so that operations could track the location of all field staff from a single Find My map.

For obvious reasons, I wanted to move all the iPads onto an MDM, and Mosyle was chosen. The big problem is that you can’t use Find My with Managed Apple Accounts.

I also wanted to avoid using non-managed Apple accounts, as each one requires a unique phone number.

Is there ANY solution for free, near realtime location tracking with this configuration?

I’ve tried Google Maps, but it seems to lose the location sharing for each iPad after a while, even when set to share indefinitely. It also requires a Google account for each device, which again requires a unique phone number.

Surely there must be some way to do this without paying for a dedicated tracking service or having to create a bunch of personal/non-managed accounts?

Using ABM for the first time here as a previous Windows sysadmin with little Apple experience. I'm trying to enrol a test device into the new ABM MDM (Built-in device management).
I have a wiped test iPad that I added to ABM using Configurator on my iPhone. In configurator I set the device management to Specific > Apple Business and the iPad is successfully added to ABM.

Then, I set up a blueprint and added the device there.

When I start from the "Hello" setup page and connect to wifi (and wait) the Managed Device popup doesn't show at any point. I already tried wiping the iPad several times and re-adding it with configurator, and also tried adding just a user to the blueprint without the device, nothing worked.

Just wondering where I'm going wrong here and what the correct process is. Note that I'm not using another MDM as of yet, still in the testing stages.

Hi all,

Started a new Sysadmin job and most of our devices are Apple. I had very little experience with Apple before starting and the previous admin has left me with a bit of a cleanup operation and I'm sure they weren't doing things the best way.

- Our field staff use iPads. Every iPad was assigned a personal Apple account such as "fieldipad-1" with its own email address and the IT mobile number as the account recovery number (this number has been exhausted since too many accounts were opened with it).

- The Apple account logins and passwords are only kept by IT so that staff can't install apps by themselves - the problem is sometimes they get randomly signed out, after updates etc. This is a problem in itself because my current password policy is long and complex passwords, so if a staff member suddenly had to sign into their Apple account, it'd be difficult to give them e.g a 64 char password.

- These field iPads are sometimes shuffled between crew members without my knowledge so there's no good register of who has what iPad at any given time, and management want to know where specific crew members are with Find My. Each iPad also has an active eSIM.

- I don't even know what's happening with the iCloud situation or how it would work considering multiple people are shuffling between devices. We also don't have any MDM as far as I'm aware.

This whole setup seems like an absolute cluster**** to me. Just wondering if anyone can enlighten me on what a sane setup would look like here.