iOS BYOD and VPP License Assignment Change

What

For a few years, device license assignment has been the preferred method for assigning licenses for managed iOS devices.  But, with BYOD enrolled devices, licenses can't be assigned to the device...  So FileWave have made some changes to how we handle this which make managing BYOD enrolled devices (and as a happy accident supervised devices) easier.

When/Why

Historically, when you created an association for a VPP app, you had a choice to assign the license to the Device, or to the User.  And, in Preferences, there was an option to set your preference (which you most likely have set to Device).  There is now a new option called "Automatic", which you will see below:

And, then on each Association that default can be overridden:

"Automatic" in this instance, basically means "Try to do a device license, but if you can't, then do a user based assignment"

Now, how does this make your life easier if you aren't going to manage BYOD devices?  That is a great question!  If you set your default setting in preferences to "Automatic", that means that all of your apps will assign to the device if they can, but if you have something that maybe you don't do much...like an app that can't do device based licensing, or an iTunes book for instance, then that association will still work even though you didn't manually change it over to "User".

How

We showed you above changing the preferences so that all new associations will be "Automatic" (which we think will work for almost all instances).  But, what happens if you enroll a new BYOD device and put it in a group that has a "Device" based association?  In short, nothing...the app will be associated, but can never install because device based license assignment can not be used.  So, for best results, you may want to consider updating older associations to "Automatic" as well.

The above may mean you have hundreds of associations to change...if that is the case, remember that you can mass-edit associations in the Associations view.