Apple Business Manager (ABM) and Apple School Manager (ASM) offer key features needed to enable a zero-touch deployment strategy.

These program assist in device enrollment by recognizing the serial number, and automatically enrolling that device into company Mobile Device Management (MDM) server the first time it’s taken out of the box and powered on. They also allow you to procure app and book licenses from Apple and remotely deploy and manage them with company MDM solution.

Automated Device Enrollment: To provide automated device enrollment into a mobile device management (MDM) server.

Apps and Books: To purchase app licenses in a bulk.

Changes to Apple Business Manager (ABM) and Apple School Manager (ASM) brought some new language in to replace the old. Below are the list of terminology that has changed over the years:

Device Enrollment Program (DEP) => Automatic Device Enrollment
Volume Purchase Program (VPP) => Apps and Books
DEP + VPP => Apple Business Manager (ABM)
DEP + VPP => Apple School Manager (ASM)

MDM server communicates to device via Apple Push notification service (APNs) and tells them how to behave. MDM software leverages the MDM framework build into Apple Operating System. With MDM solutions, we can build configuration profiles based on various settings you’d like to deliver and push them to the devices over the air via APN’s. Configuration profiles are normally XML files and can be build on the MDM server.