News Flash: Apple Products Are Not IT Friendly
Last week, we talked about the impact of the bring your own device phenomenon on IT. It’s become accepted practice in many organizations to let users bring their devices and many are choosing iOS much to the chagrin of IT.
While Android comes with its own set of potential mine fields, a Network World report from MacIT, the IT track of the Macworld conference, indicated there were complaints aplenty from IT folks who are stuck supporting devices that are clearly designed for consumers.
IT is left to deal with iTunes and Apple IDs and how to bill back app purchases. This is probably not what you had in mind when you decided to go for a career in IT, but it’s part of the brave new world of IT support.
Network World puts it in more blunt terms: “adapt or die.” And from what so-called Apple experts were saying, you’re left with little recourse, because well, Apple doesn’t seem to listen to anyone. They don’t have to.
As a reporter, I can tell you Apple rarely if ever responds to requests for information. If you check Apple’s Facebook page, it has over 2 million fans, but as Nicole Ferraro points out on Internet Evolution, its wall is empty and it doesn’t allow anyone to leave comments, whether to complain or praise them — and you can be sure there would be plenty of complaints if they opened up from people upset about their labor practices in China to people ticked off that there aren’t even rudimentary tools for IT to deal with Apple products on an enterprise scale.
Yet people love Apple products and there’s the rub for you as an IT professional. As an Apple product user myself, I totally get the appeal, but I could also see if I worked inside a large organization I might want some tools to help me support my users that were geared toward my needs.
Oh you can complain of course. As the Network World piece pointed out, you can leave nasty messages on the Apple forums, and I’m sure that will get you far, or you can simply accept the fact that Apple doesn’t seem to care enough to listen to its customers because we buy the products anyway.
The bottom line is this though. As long as your users (and probably you too for many of you) are using Apple products, we have to accept this situation or use our power collectively as consumers to complain and force Apple to bend to our will — not the other way around.
Unfortunately, it’s been more than a decade since Steve Jobs began the turn-around, and even though he’s gone, there doesn’t seem to be any sign that Apple is going to be any more responsive any time soon.
That leaves you in IT between a rock and a hard place where you must adapt or die. Having fun yet?
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You’ve desribed nearly every reason why I won’t buy, or even use for free, an Apple product ever again.
As pretty as they are, they are effectively non functional, unless what you want to do happens to coincide with what Apple have decided is within their best interests for you to do. Deviate from that path and your iOS device is nothing more than a great looking boat anchor.
Unfortunately my boat already has an anchor, and it really doesn’t need to be pretty, just functional.
tracyanne,
That’s fine for you and you’re certainly entitled to make your device choices, but the fact is that other people in the organization are very likely using Apple products and if you are in IT, you have to deal with the fall-out of managing without adequate tools from Apple to do the job.
“If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” – Henry Ford
They are perfectly entitled as designers to follow their own conceptual model of what their product should be and what it should include. They’re designing it for people, not for corporations. There are many issues (ethical and otherwise) with Apple products, but the ability for large organisations to manage and monitor them in a BYOD scenario is most certainly not the most important.
tzar,
Apple has always done what it wants, but if it truly wants to be an enterprise-friendly company, it will provide the tools for IT to manage these devices (or some entrepreneurs should fill the void).
The premise that the “Business world” has to accept Apple mobile products operation as they are or die is ridiculous on it’s face, as I am aware of many companies here in USA – small, medium and large who have set strict policies for Apple products use inside and for the business.
Some even requires Apple users to pay for third party “interface” and “security” connection tools, so as to maintain the company’s level and standard of network and software security.
In Europe and Asia, as well as much of South America, there is significantly less “roll over for Apple” as is indicated in the article. Maybe this a an American reaction.
W. Anderson,
The fact is that the consumerization of IT and the Bring Your Own Device movement is very real and many folks are bringing Apple products to work. I noted last year at the CeBIT conference that I saw several executives speak and they to a person alluded to the iPhone and iPad (and these were not necessarily American executives — this was a German conference). People are using these products whether you know it or not and it’s likely they are using them in the executive suite and throughout the organization with or without your knowledge.
Instead of a big whining moan and repeating a couple of irrelevant memes, what are the actual tools you need to support Apple users. Or is it that being a reporter and not IT staff, you don’t know wtf you are talking about.
Frac,
If you click through to the Network World article that was my spark for this piece, you’ll note that I’m writing this precisely because experts who were asked about this at the MacIT conference were at a loss for answers regarding tools. While Apple has tried to make the iPhone IT friendly by having an Exchange connector for several years, there remain a number of sticky problems including the Apple ID and link to iTunes I alluded to. The iTunes problem is being relieved somewhat by the cloud update service, but Apple to this point sees this as a consumer product and has failed to provide the tools to make it easier for IT. If you know of some, please leave a comment.
And yes, I’m a reporter. I’m not working in IT, but that doesn’t mean I can’t articulate actual problems faced by IT as I learn about them.
You should have actually gone to MacIT. The sentiments you express in this article is not what I experienced at the MacIT conference.
Had you been there you would know about Mobile Device Management software from companies like JAMF, Air Watch, and several others.
Flex,
Right, but I wasn’t there, which is why I was writing based on a report of someone who did attend and made a point of the fact that there was a dearth of answers each time IT pros asked these questions. As much as I would have liked to be there by the way, I don’t have the resources or time to attend every conference.
This document seems to highlight features of the iPad that make supporting it in an enterprise not so difficult:
http://www.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iPad_Business.pdf
This document seems to answer a lot of the complaints here. All that I did to find it was search at apple.com for enterprise support tools. There also is a document of this nature for iPhones that showed up in the search results.
Garret,
That’s a very useful document. I was aware of the Exchange services, and this does address some concerns, but it’s hard to get around some of the very consumer-centric Apple approaches such as the Apple ID and it doesn’t really address how to incorporate Apple into your own security identification infrastructure.
That said, it’s a very useful document, and I thank you for sharing it with me. And it shows me that I need to step back and do a bit more digging on my own before I publish.
What I am missing is context: the situation with other mobile devices. How well does an Android phone play with a Linux or Windows corporate environment? Or a Windows phone?
I have Mac Mini and a Linux desktop. They are breath of fresh air after using Windows for years. Every time I have to do some Windows support for my family, I am relieved that I am not using it. As computers in an enterprise setting, Mac OS X or Linux computers can get the job done as well. As for mobile devices, I think I can see the frustration/despair of the IT department. With ever increasing demands for security, every mobile device must come across as a Trojan horse. But is it just the iPhone?
Johan:
It is certainly not limited to the iPhone, and I acknowledged that up front. I picked on Apple here because of the news that came out of the MacIT conference about the depressing lack of IT support from Apple, but you’re right. It’s a mobile device problem, and this is especially true as organizations increasingly allow employees to pick their own. Because Apple is popular and IT is seeing more Apple devices because of that, I chose to discuss them. Look for a post later about a possible solution to this problem.
The essential problem here is that Apple devices are designed to be used in the Apple Corral, where everything plays nicely with everything else because it is a more or less closed environment and it’s relatively easy to make sure everything talks to everything else. But you have to decide to join the Apple “club” and do only the things that the Apple designers want you to do, and only in the way they prescribe.
As such they are much closer to being consumer devices with ease of use and visual and tactile appeal being very high in the design priorities. That’s great if you’re a consumer, although I do worry about the near religious fanaticism of many Apple devotees, not least because religious devotion has been known to suppress the critical faculties of disciples!
The world of PCs and Windows is often messy and sometimes just ghastly, and even a brand new Windows PC is farther away from being a consumer device. However, they remain true “general purpose computing devices” in that you can connect “any” hardware and run “any” software you like rather than the Apple certified (and very expensive) hardware and packaged software (that is usually pretty much plug and play.) That’s what makes the Windows PC world the messy place it is, and you sometimes need to bleed a little in getting things to work – that is in the nature of a general purpose environment.
Notice that none of the above makes Apple “better” than a Windows PC, nor worse, nor is it “better designed”. In fact many agree with me that there are some deliberate design decisions made by Apple that are screamingly awful; like iTunes, like iPad file management, like iPad syncing being only one-way, like Apple ID, like iPad essentially being a tether to a real computer, inability to sync backup or restore non-purchased data to a different real computer (the Apple help desk said “it might work…” – it didn’t.)
It is a different beast aimed at a different market, and in fact has surfaced a market and users that were previously latent. Do you remember when Linux rolled up somebody suggested the analogy of Linux being like the marketplace where co-development and easy interchange allowed collaborative free development? This was in opposition to the “the cathedral” of Microsoft where everything was determined centrally and there was no possibility of the users contributing to the design.
What Apple did was to invent a third paradigm where Apple “knows” what the right design decisions are, and genuinely do not care whether that’s what the user actually needs or wants. Far from being able to choose what you want to plug in and play you choose a very large library of predefined and approved components. Most people love this to bits because it works as long as you don’t try to make it do something it wasn’t designed to, like integrate it into a non Apple designed environment. The funny thing is that this third paradigm isn’t beyond the marketplace, it’s gone the other way: Apple have invented “The Vatican”.
But Apple, like Microsoft before it, and IBM before that, are going through the Dominance, Arrogance, Denial, then Change or Die cycle. Apple are pretty much sitting on the cusp between Arrogance and Denial at the moment. The Arrogance is that they just “know” what’s best for you. The Denial is that they neither listen to their users before or after purchase, so have no real channel to detect dissatisfaction, so (and you heard it here first) it will be this that causes Apple between one and ten years from now to either Fail or Change.
I support Apple products in the Enterprise and we have developed all sorts of methods to enable IT to effectively manage deploying these devices. MDM is a crucial piece in this puzzle and it must be in place. The best way to manage your purchases for applications is to purchase through the Volume Purchase program and import your redemption codes into your MDM of choice. As far as the organization “owning” the application goes, a best practice is to create a second set of email addresses tied to an employee ID or something unique. When the user/device gets retired, you can then switch the ID to another user and still have control and ownership over the Apps redeemed under the given account.