Introduction to WingMDM
What is MDM?
Section titled “What is MDM?”Mobile Device Management (MDM) is a general term for remote management of mobile devices such as phones or laptops. Different platforms such as Android, iOS or Windows have different management capabilities.
Apple MDM is specifically management of Apple devices such as iPads, Macbooks or Apple TVs.
Apple provides a mechanism for MDM of iOS devices, but does not provide the implementation. This is instead provides by MDM vendors (publishers of MDM solutions), such as WingMDM.
To learn more about Apple MDM, see Choose a mobile device management solution.
How does it work?
Section titled “How does it work?”To manage an iOS device, there is a 3-way handshake between Apple, the MDM vendor (e.g. WingMDM), and the user (you). This process is described in the Initial Setup section.
Once this handshake is complete, you can enroll iPad devices on WingMDM, which allows WingMDM to manage them on your behalf. iPads will periodically check in with WingMDM, and WingMDM can push configuration changes to the iPads (when prompted by you to do so).
This push goes over Apple’s Push Notification service (APNs), which requires an active internet connection on the iPad.
What makes WingMDM different?
Section titled “What makes WingMDM different?”Most vendors provide very generic interfaces, giving you a wide flexibility but requiring you to do a lot of work to manage devices sensibly.
These solutions generally designed for enterprise usecases, where every employee might be assigned an identical iPhone or Macbook and management is overseen by a dedicated operations team.
Our experience is that this model doesn’t translate well in the yachting industry, where:
- AV/IT officers are busy and have to deal with lots of different technologies
- iPads are deployed to locations (e.g. different guest areas), not to people
- Deployments aren’t uniform: common areas vs. cabins, guest areas vs. crew areas
- Changes need to be managed carefully, to avoid risk of impacting guests
- Devices might need to be moved between different areas on short notice
Instead, WingMDM is designed from the ground up for use on yachts. It provides a simple powerful model for defining how you’d like your devices to be configured, with customised interfaces for commonly used features that are less common in other industries, such as regularly changing timezones.
WingMDM then internally flattens and translates this model into a set of per-device configuration, which it queues up and waits for the AV/IT officer to be ready to roll out changes.