Distributing IOS Apps through SMC 3.6

Question

HI, can anyone offer any guidance on purchasing/deploying IOS Apps through SMC?

I have enrolled in the Apple VPP scheme and downloaded the token to SMC, but cant find any instructions on where to go from here

I cant buy Apps through the VPP until I have set up a VPP Facilitator account, but cannot find out how to do this so cannot buy the apps.

And what happens then - the Apple documentaion implies that I then have to invite end users to create their own apple-id and link it to the VPP using iTunes to be abel to download the app, but this sounds very long-winded and complicated.

Surely the whole point of any MDM solution should be that it is able to deploy apps without the end-users involvement?

Any help or sadvice would be much appreciated....

This thread was automatically locked due to age.

SDU · Accepted Answer

Hi Dave,

sorry for the late reply.

You have to create an application package for the iOS app you want to deploy and use a link you can get from here.

Once the VPP application package is created and saved you have two possibilities to assign VPP licenses to users.

1. Via the application package itself.

Edit the VPP application package in the SMC console and press the "Show" button next to VPP licenses.

You can now select all the VPP users which you have invited and who already confirmed the inviation.

2. Via the "VPP users" section

Go to the "VPP users" section and edit the user in question. Once in the edit mode, press the "Show VPP licenses" button.
In this view, all your VPP apps should be displayed and you can mark the checkbox to assign one license to this user.

Once a license is assigned to the user, you can deploy the packages to the devices.

In general, the whole VPP / application handling stuff is desribed in chapter 16 of the administrator guide.

I hope this helps.

Best regards

Stefan