Maurice Matthew

How IT admin manage devices based off of delayed information

MobiControl needs to send commands to devices for status updates and configuration changes.

Right now, MDM is mostly reactive: a device joins the management service, gets profiles to set its desired state, and then reports its status. The server and device go back and forth to confirm the device’s state and take action if needed. This back-and-forth can strain the server, especially with many devices.

The cost to users by misinformation

Unprepared for abrupt changes can lead to service interruptions during troubleshooting. This often results in increased spending on technical support and travel expenses, and a significant waste of time resolving complicated issues.

How might we empower IT Admin to receive device status updates and push configurations autonomously with less back and forth?

Proactive device management with Apple’s tools

Declarative device management is like an upgraded way to manage devices. It works alongside the current device management system but makes things faster and easier. Instead of constantly asking the device what's happening (like checking in all the time), it lets the device handle things on its own and give updates whenever there's a change. This helps the whole system run more smoothly and handle more devices at once.
Configurations
Configurations are similar to MDM’s existing profile payloads; for example, accounts, and settings, and restrictions. See Declarative configurations in the MDM settings section.
Assets
Assets consist of reference data that’s required by configurations for large data items and per-user data; assets have a one-to-many relationship with configurations.
Activations
Activations are a set of configurations that are applied atomically to the device and can include predicates, such as “device type is iPad” or “operating system version greater than iPadOS 16.1.” There is a many-to-many relationship between activations and configurations.

Creating a space for new protocol

The declarations intertwine with the current profiles to allow devices to provide status updates asynchronously. With there being many declarations that a user may create, the original flow accounted for a reserved home for each of the declaration tools at the top level of the profile page.

Ensuring to maintain the integrity of the sys. arch. 

With MobiControl being a platform agnostic product, we had to embed the declarative tools deeper within the profile flow to not show favor Apple device configurations over the other platforms we service.

Testing and approval from stakeholders 

Once the information architecture had been decided, this paved the way for the following steps of wireframing and high-fidelity prototype after that.

Introducing autonomous device management

This protocol significantly reduces network traffic, decreases the latency of device status updates, and empowers the device to maintain compliant states even when offline.