Jeremy Butcher Talks Apple Business Essentials

The Small business show episode 359 for Wednesday, December 22, 2021. Greetings folks and welcome here to the Small business show at BusinessShow Co, where we are small businessing together every single week. Sponsors for this episode include shopify.com SBS where you can get a 14 day trial and full access to their entire suite of features. We'll talk more about Shopify shortly here in the episode, but for now here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton with a special interview for you today. As you know, I am also the co host of the macgeek Gab podcast where we talk about solving Apple problems. And as a small business owner and an Apple person, I was super interested when Apple recently released their Apple Business Essentials which is currently in beta available to anybody here. This is an, you know, very generically an MDM program, but it's a whole lot more than that because it comes from Apple MDM being mobile device management and it certainly has elements of that, but it also has elements of a lot of other things that Apple and only Apple can do for us. And to dig into it, we are super fortunate today to have Apple's own Jeremy Butcher. He is in charge of enterprise and education project marketing at Apple and he has agreed to join us today to dig in and answer all of our questions about everything we would want to know about how this is going to work for us, the small business owners. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining us here today. This is amazing to be able to have you sort of help us understand all the little nuances of Apple Business essentials. So let's start at the top. I mean this is clearly built for the small business owner who has been in the position like so many of us have, where we're the first point of contact for someone that, that works for us who says I have trouble with my ex or I have a question about my device or my software or something. And it seems like from a very zoomed out point of view, that's exactly who you're targeting and what you're trying to solve.

That is, first of all, thank you for having me. Glad to be here. But yes, that is absolutely what we're trying to help with. We talk about Business Essentials as something that we're trying to help with the entire life cycle of the device. So it's how can we get you set up? How can we help you stay up and running if something happens to your device? How can we get you back up and running quickly? But we really did look at all those little touch points, those opportunities for someone to have some downtime. And that's the stuff that we tried to attack in terms of giving a solution to, like you said, that small business, maybe IT person, maybe owner, maybe all of the above, who just would rather be doing other things than answering some of these questions. And we want to give them those tools so that they can stay focused on what they got into business to do in the first place.

To do in the first place, Absolutely. Yeah. Well, we always say, you know, when you're a solopreneur, you fill out an org chart and you put your name in every box. And often the it box is one of the last ones, ones where you replace things. So.

Yes, yes.

And this seems like it might, it might be able to do that. Is, is there a minimum number of employees or devices that can be used as part of Apple Business Essentials? I mean, is there a, is there a minimum size company that this is for? Can it really be for, you know, a company that's got two or three people working there?

So there's no minimum.

Okay.

There's no technical minimum. So if somebody wants to do this for two or three people group, great. Of course we're trying to make this as easy to use as possible. The reality, as you know, I'm sure is they're probably going to be a little bit bigger by the time they start to think about this.

Absolutely.

But if they wanted to, great, we'd be thrilled. We think it's, you know, we've built it in a way that, like I said, is trying to be as easy to use as possible. We're probably going to see folks more in that like 20 range start to really, to pick it up for the, again, the obvious reasons, like when you have two or three people, it's fairly easy to tell two or three people to do the same thing. And it's pretty easy to repeat because it's like you look to your left and you look to your right and you're all set. Yeah. And you're all set. You've had a whole like, you know, communication meeting for your entire company. But when you start to creep up a little bit higher, it's just a lot easier to do things for folks. And that's where we think that will really start to help folks out a lot.

Right. Okay. So in terms of setup and onboarding, how much is involved from the business owners or the IT person's standpoint? The person sort of overseeing the whole system, what does that process take? Is it Is it, you know, something that they can do in a morning, in a day, in an hour? Like, what does that look like?

I think a morning is probably the shortest answer. So what they will want to do, once they've kind of, you know, they've gotten into the product, they've set up their account, the way that I think about it is they sort of, they put together their ingredients and they build their recipe and that's the process that they're gonna take. And once they've done that, that's where all the automation can kick in because you've got a recipe, you've got your ingredients and the next person just comes in and you can create the dish on repeat, over and over. But the ingredients, yeah, the ingredients are devices, apps, settings and identities. So you create an ID for somebody, you create rules for that id, you can link it up with your directory service. So that's a great way to automate it. You can buy the apps that you want, you can have the right number of licenses, so you do some of that assembly. But like I said, you do that in that kind of first time experience. And once you've set it up, that's when folks just come in, the next person starts in your company or you roll it out to another person, they sign in and all of the work that you've done that one time is now made available to them.

Just, just, it just flows through to whatever, whatever you set up for them to have done. So.

Right.

The word collections is, is what you're using to describe collections of devices or people or both, depending on how you do things, which seems to really be at the heart of this. What are some of the more common collection use cases? What are our listeners going to hear you say and go, ah, that's. I need to do that. That makes sense to me.

Yeah. So there's a couple things that come to mind. One is we think it's going to be very common for someone to create the collection for all employees.

Right.

So it's just the baseline. I want everybody to get on the WI fi. I want everybody to have this set of apps. So it's that combination of apps and settings that no matter what function you have in the company, we want you to have this.

Got it.

So that's one example. The beauty of these collections is that you can layer them on top of each other. So you might have that baseline and then you've got the design team or the engineering team or the accounting team and they just have a different set of apps from everybody. Else. And so you can start to create these collections of apps for different functions that again, because they're in the accounting group, again, it might be an accounting group of two people, sure, you and the accountant. But still you've got that collection that you can create that is the custom set of software that they might want to be given access to. So you, as you go ahead, one, one more I'll give you is as you start to move up market a little bit more and you start to get into a company that might have multiple locations, that becomes another great sort of filter that you would apply. Right. This branch has a different WI FI network. Maybe we need VPN over here. And so you start to see those things get established where you've got these different groupings of people where they just need different things. And that's how we kind of think that these collections will get created and then ultimately layered on top of each other.

That makes sense. Okay, so you mentioned WI fi, you mentioned vpn. Of course, apps make sense. I'm curious how deep this goes with the settings that people are talking about. So you talked about generally networking. Are there other types of settings that we might push down to employees, devices?

Yeah, another big category. And we do this in the admin side of Business Essentials where we actually start to organize settings into different buckets. One of those is security. So it's are we going to turn on a firewall on your Mac? Are we going to do followvault? Are we going to do passcode protection? That's a good category of things that you'll see where again as you start to creep up into larger organizations and you can't just tell everybody like, hey, you have a passcode. Right. It gives you that ability to know that everybody's on that same level. And so that's another good example of kind of a category of things that we do. There's other stuff like printers we can set up printing for folks that again, if they're using printing still, then they'll have access to it. Maybe that design team that loves to print out every mock up they put together.

No, that makes sense. Okay, yeah. So lots of different task specific or location specific settings to.

Yeah, yep.

And then security. So with security, as I dug through this, it clearly or it was clear to me that all of this triggers from a person's Apple id. Right. And so that when they sign in, then their device just starts to get all of the things that you have provisioned for them to get. Is there a way for someone to, in a byod, you know, bring your own device scenario, Is there a way for someone to maintain their personal Apple ID on a device and have, you know, the business data either assigned to their personal ID or assigned to a business id? But is there a way to sort of live in both worlds without their personal data necessarily being exposed to both worlds?

Yeah, absolutely. So everything that we're doing is built on top of something that we introduced a couple of years ago called managed Apple IDs. And these are not personal Apple IDs. Basically, they are Apple IDs that your company creates for you.

Got it.

If somebody has ever been told, go create an Apple ID with your work email address and we'll call that your work Apple id, it's not a managed Apple id. That is a personal Apple ID that happens to be associated with your company email account. Because at the end of the day, you set it up, you have the password, you could change all the attributes about that account. And so we heard that feedback from folks years ago, and they said we really do want to actually create them for people and be able to provide services and take things away when they leave. So that's what managed Apple ID does. And so that's what we. And all the things related to Business Essentials, that's what we're assigning it to. We're never assigning it to your personal account.

Got it.

But the way that we solve for what you were asking about with BYOD is through a technology that we introduced a couple of years ago that we've continued to improve upon, that we call user enrollment. And it's exactly what you asked, which is it's the ability to add in a managed Apple ID on a device that's already signed in with your personal account. So if you're sitting, and I can only imagine you are, but if a listener is sitting in front of their device that's running iOS 15 or iPadOS 15, they can go into settings, general VPN and device management. And there is a little button that says sign in with your school or work account. And that's something that we built into the operating system so that we could deliver the type of experience that we wanted to do with Apple Business Essentials, where they just tap on that they've got their personal account already signed in and they're adding in their managed Apple id.

That makes perfect sense. Oh, that's brilliant. Okay, great. So it solves that problem. And. And I'm assuming just based on what I know about Apple and your concerns about privacy, but also what it Says on the site about Abe, about Apple Business essentials that that personal data never flows through to what the company gets to see.

Right, Right. So the cleanest way for folks to kind of wrap their head around that is in the form of a secondary account. I have one account for personal, one for work. So that's one. The other is that when you're doing this user enrollment or BYOD style management, we've actually, you know, at the protocol level this is even something that any MDM would kind of be subject to. But user enrollment has a subset of the management capabilities. So a good example of that is with regular mdm for a device that's owned by the organization, a remote wipe command is the equivalent of erase all contents and settings. Everything's gone. It's Apple logo and the little progress like everything's erased off of that device. With user enrollment, what we do is we basically remove all of the enterprise data because we've created a separate partition on the phone or the iPad that we can just blow away and so all of your personal stuff remains untouched.

Got it.

It's the same command that we send via mdm, but we just implement it differently on the client, whether or not it's a company owned device or a personally owned device.

Makes perfect sense. That's brilliant. That's outstanding. That's great. All right. Hey, I wanted to take a minute because you know what, you know what that sound is? That's the sound of a sale happening on Shopify, our sponsor and the all in one commerce platform to start, run and grow your business. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere. Giving entrepreneurs like me and Shannon, who have both used Shopify over the years, the resources once reserved for big business all customized for our needs. With a great looking online store that brings our ideas to life and gives us tools to manage our day to day and drive sales, you can make your ideas a reality really fast. When you implement Shopify, you don't want to have to create this on your own. And the good news is you don't have to because Shopify has already done it. They are the experts in making this happen and, and you get to leverage all of that expertise. It's amazing how quickly I was able to get up and running. The first time I used Shopify, it was like oh, I already knew what to do. They just make it super easy. And it's not just me. Shopify powers over 1.7 million entrepreneurs from first sale to full scale. And every 28 seconds, a small business owner makes Their first sale on Shopify. See, there it goes again. I told you. Get started by building and customizing your online store. With no coding or design experience, you can access all their powerful tools that help you find customers, drive sales, and then also manage that important day to day. They've got 24. 7 support, so you're never alone. More than just a store, Shopify grows with you. And go to shopify.com SBS that's all lowercase for a free 14 day trial and you get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Start selling on Shopify today. Go to shopify.com SBS right now. Shopify.com SBS and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. All right, so as I was digging into this and thinking about what's going to resonate here with everybody listening, it seems like support is where Apple Business Essentials, where it really gets separated from pretty much everything else that someone might be thinking about in this realm. And honestly, I think it's the killer feature of what you've created here. Because as I understand it, Abe empowers users to get their own support without first having to go to the IT person or business owner or, you know, one in the same saying, hey, can you, I've got a problem with my Mac, I've got a problem with my iPhone. Can you look at this for me? AB has this dedicated 24. 7 support team for everyone that's in it. Right. And this isn't just, I'm having a hardware problem or an iOS 15 related problem. This is a, you know, can you help me with setting up a printer problem?

Right, yeah. So yes to all of that. Yeah, we absolutely will help your IT person with the IT parts of things. Sure. And that's where typically, you know, support kind of ends. You're getting support for Apple Business Essentials. But as you know, we have the benefit of also being able to have that same team now know everything there is to know about, like you said, iOS 15, iPadOS, 15 Mac OS. And so you can call in and get help with what you might otherwise get help at the Genius bar or whatever the case. And so we give some examples of, you know, hey, I heard that my iPhone camera can be used to scan a document, but how does that actually work? It's like, great, you don't have to call me. You can call the people that made the feature.

Yeah.

And they'll help you with it. Yeah. And if we, if you're having trouble adding an airprint printer, great. Well, that's part of what AppleCare helps people with every day, you know, and so it's taking advantage of just kind of the. The breadth of knowledge that AppleCare has to provide support and really, like you said, kind of offload that from the person who would otherwise get tasked with answering all of these different questions.

Well, it seems like at the very least, and it. I'm sure it's more than this, but at the very least it is making it so that the. The IT person or the business owner is no longer the first point of contact when one of those things comes up. And that's outstanding. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's even the MDM kind of component. The device management part of Business Essentials helps in that sense. Because if I set up the WI FI for you, I'm not going to get the phone call from you of what's the WI FI password. So there's the device management is already one step in the right direction in terms of offloading employee support, but then to be able to supplement that for everything else that's just related to things that that IT person really shouldn't have been responsible for. But we all know ends up being because it's a technology question. So I know who to call. Yeah, we really want to help as much as we can in offloading that.

Yeah, that's awesome. And I realize it's in Apple Business Essentials is in beta right now until the spring and that makes it free right now until the spring. But it sounds like once it becomes not free and launches out of beta, AppleCare plus is somehow gonna be a part of this. Is that right? That was somewhat confusing on the website.

So the way you can think about it is we have three plans right now that are on the website. They're actually. Even though it's all free, we show you what the pricing will be so that you know kind of what you're getting used to expect. Yeah, exactly. But really the simplest way to think about it is that when AppleCare plus for Business Essentials is available, it'll just three more plans where you take the three that we have today and you add AppleCare plus for Business Essentials and it's not AppleCare plus, it's not AppleCare for Enterprise. Those are two things that we have that exist. This is a dedicated. And you've saw the kind of custom set of functionality that goes along with it, but it's a dedicated thing where we took, in my opinion, a lot of the best pieces of the programs that exist for small business and put them into this business Essentials offering.

That's. That's amazing. Well, people. And I realize I might be getting us into the weeds, so forgive me, but you know, if somebody's got a BYOD where they've brought their own device and then I as the business owner want to add AppleCare plus to that while they work for me, is that something that can still be done or is that not really how this is going to work?

No, that's absolutely how it's going to work. Which we think is pretty cool. Yeah.

So, yeah. Because it's not something you can do right now. That's.

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, if you. Let's just say that they, that your company bought you a Mac and as a result they gave you Apple Business Essentials. They gave you AppleCare, but they also got you one of the plans that supports multiple devices. You can bring your phone into the office, it can be managed. So from a company perspective, it's now got your email on it, it's connected to WI Fi, you're using it for work and as a benefit to the employee of that, they end up getting that device covered, but it's not covered in a way that is costing the organization more. They've already bought the plan, they've got the opportunity to support multiple devices with it. And so, yeah, it was one of those things. And if you Happen to have AppleCare plus because you bought it as a consumer, we just kind of stack the coverage and then you just get kind of the best of both offerings. And so we think it's going to be great for folks. When you think about the privacy stuff that we've already talked about, like I can trust that I can bring my personal device in. I'm kind of doing this anyway where I use it for work and so now I can kind of get some benefit from it in a way that's still private for my data. We think it's a good win win for everybody.

That's amazing. That's. I, like I said, I think the support part of this is the game changer that no one else has been able to offer to anyone before because they're not you. And that's a great thing. I mean, it's awesome to see all of this come together this way. One last thing, because support, I think is so important.

Yeah, yeah.

I mentioned or I noticed on the website that there's on site support as part of this too. Is that available, you know, nationwide at the moment? Like how does that work?

So this falls into the, you know, coming in the spring category of course, yeah, yeah, but it will. And we've already, I think, got a couple of these little notes on the website. We have to obviously sort out the full range of hardware that we can support. Like, you know, a truck is only so big and we can only fit so many different SKUs and colors and configs and everything across iPhone, iPad and Mac. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely. Our teams are hard at work on that. And then there's also the kind of, you know, city availability. So the goal is obviously to be covering as many people as possible. We will take an approach where we kind of roll it out in phases where it's like, okay, let's start with iPhone. Let's start in these 10 or 15 cities and then over time work to expand to as much as we can. But we set, we think, a pretty high bar in terms of how quickly we get to you because we wanted it to be differentiated if it's of a certain amount of time and you're going to be down for half a day anyway. Well, maybe it's actually better to go to a place to get it repaired or if you start to get even higher than that. Well, we already offer next business day, so we've already got a pretty high bar in terms of like, we can get you back up and running without on site tomorrow. And so how do we raise that bar? And so that's, that's where you get to that four hour, you know, SLA that we're shooting for in terms of on site. And so, but yeah, we're, it's one of the things that we're the most excited about because the feedback from people has been so positive. Yeah, it's just, I think, very exciting, especially you know, in the world where folks are working from home more and more and hybrid and all these other things. You can't just walk down the hall necessarily to where the spares are kept. And if I have to send you, if I happen to be at the office and I have to send you a device, we're already looking at next business day. So there's, there's a lot of benefit that really just sort of happened upon us with on site becoming even more valuable and just the way that work has changed in the last, you know, 18 months.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I mean, and it's been that way for companies who have been remote, you know, for decades.

Yeah.

You know, and, and we've run into that here where it's like, oh, you know, my, my, whatever flaked out, it's like, okay, well if we were next door to each other this would be a 10 minute solve. But it's not, you know. And yeah, yeah, that's amazing. Is there anything I have missed here, Jeremy, that I, that I want to make sure we get to people? Because I think we've covered it all.

I think so too. Yeah. I mean the only other piece of it that I think would be worth touching on is around storage. We talk about obviously we're adding either 50 gigs or 200 gigs or 2 terabytes and we were talking about backup in that context of the ability to backup data and I think it's worth double clicking a little bit on how that actually works in the context of layering in your work account. On your personal device.

On your personal device. Sure. Okay. Yeah, right. Cause it's not just icloud as we know it, backup.

Yeah. So well and also just because we're not backing up your work stuff necessarily when you have your personal data. So this is your personal backup is just exactly what you would expect it to be today. It continues to function in the same way. What we're adding, and this is actually part of iOS 15.2 that's in beta right now, but is something that we were building towards in support of Apple Business Essentials is even for that secondary account we're going to do backup and restore of your business data that doesn't already get stored in the cloud and those types of things. So that really is what allows us to have this. Even if you broke a device and you're getting back up and running or you upgraded to a new one or whatever the the case may be and you're now setting up your device again, you sign in with your Apple id, the configurations come down from device management, your data comes down from iCloud, both the data that you've stored in the cloud, but also that backup. And so that's what we think kind of gives you that whole backup and running in minutes capability because we've covered all the different places that your data might have been stored.

That makes sense.

And so that's huh, you know, backup as it exists on a company owned device where it's just backing up works the same way on the Mac where we don't have icloud backup. You're obviously relying on your data being stored in the cloud in the first place. But on a device where you've got BYOD and you want to restore your work data and your personal data, it's something that we've built also into the Operating system to support.

So on the Mac would. If someone has, you know, a personal. If they bring their own laptop or whatever and they're. And they're doing it that way, would they have. I mean, are there two documents folders, one for their personal documents and one for their business documents, and they each get sort of synced to the different icloud stores? Is that how that goes?

So on the Mac, we're focusing on basically the company provided Mac solution for now.

Okay.

Mostly because while it does exist, for sure, it doesn't exist nearly as much as it does on iPhone and iPad in terms of byod. So you gotta start somewhere and that's where we are with the Mac. But to answer your question in the context of like iPad, for example. Yeah. You literally have, you know, two iCloud Drive accounts that show up in your files app. One of them's decorated with the name of your company.

Sure.

And then the other one just says icloud drive. But yeah, it gives you multiple documents folders, all those different things that you would expect from a full fledged iCloud Drive account.

Okay. Okay, that makes sense. Okay. So the Mac is not yet able to be bifurcated in the way that iPad and iPhone can. Okay, Correct. Got it.

Got it.

All right, that makes sense. Makes sense. This is amazing. I'm actually really, I mean, I was excited about this when I saw the press release come out, and I'm even more excited now that I've dug in and gotten to hear about this from you. So thank you so much for, for coming and, and telling us all. Yeah, this, this is great.

Happy to. Yeah, we're, we're super excited. As well as you can imagine. It's been a, a lot of hard work that I get to represent in an awesome team that's been. Been plugging away for a bit. So it's pretty cool.

That's amazing. Well, thanks to you coming here and thanks to the team for working to make it happen. And I wish you the best as you head towards the spring with the phased rollout and all that stuff. Yeah, we'll be watching.

Go sign up for the beta. Let us know how it goes.

I mean, that's the thing, right? Is it? The beta is an easy thing for people to sign up to.

Totally.

And you get to test it out for free and really get to touch it, which is great.

Exactly. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Good deal.

Thanks again. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Dave. Of course.

Amazing. This is fantastic. The fact that Apple has tied support together with this so that it offloads that responsibility from us, the small business owners, so that we can get back to our small business ing and not let our technical skills be a liability to our businesses. They should be an asset owner and Apple's business essentials is a great way to limit that from happening. It's amazing. And again, our thanks to Jeremy. Hey, and we've got lots more coming for you. Make sure you check out Shopify, of course, @shopify.com SBS and keep living that charmed life. I know this is going to help.