A.1 Migrating to Apple Business Manager

A.1.1 Best Practices

This section is applicable for VPP purchasers who have already upgraded or are planning to upgrade to Apple Business Manager from the Apple Deployment Programs account. This section details the best practices to migrate to a location-based token in ZENworks.

If you want to migrate an existing VPP subscription (that uses a legacy token) to a location-based token (provided by Apple Business Manager) and associate all the existing bundle assignments to this new location-based token, then as a best practice it is recommended that you renew the subscription to the location-based token. This ensures that all existing bundle assignments work seamlessly with the new location-based token. However, you can renew the subscription only if the VPP account (associated with the subscription) is mapped to a unique location. As recommended by Apple, it is advisable to migrate one VPP purchaser to one location in Apple Business Manager, which makes a location unique. This ensures that all the licenses (assigned or unassigned) are automatically migrated to the Apps and Books section of Apple Business Manager.

For example: if you have an existing subscription XYZ in your ZENworks zone, then in Apple Business Manager, you can migrate the account of this subscription to location XYZ.

If in ZENworks, instead of renewing the subscription, you create a new subscription using the location-based token while retaining the existing subscription, then it might lead to duplication and VPP licenses might be reset.

Procedure to migrate to location-based token in ZENworks

Before migrating to a location-based token in ZENworks, ensure that you have migrated the existing VPP account to the unique location. For more information, see the Apple Support documentation.

  1. Login to Apple Business Manager using your VPP account credentials.

  2. Navigate to Settings > Apps and Books.

  3. Download the token of a specific unique location (example: location XYZ).

  4. Navigate back to ZCC.

  5. Click the existing subscription (example: subscription XYZ).

  6. Click Renew Token and select the location-based token that you had just downloaded.

IMPORTANT:After migrating all the VPP accounts to Apple Business Manager, ensure that you use only location-based tokens to manage VPP licenses in ZENworks and not a combination of both account-based and location-based tokens. If both account-based and location-based tokens are used to create subscriptions in the zone, then you might face license-related issues, such as resetting of assigned licenses and it can also result in duplicate subscriptions in the zone that might lead to confusion.

A.1.2 Troubleshooting Scenarios

When assigned licenses do not transfer:

If the location in Apple Business Manager is not a unique location, then only the unassigned licenses are transferred to this location. A location is considered as non-unique if:

  • A location already has licenses in it before the VPP purchaser migrates to that location.

  • The location’s token is downloaded before the first VPP purchaser migrates to that location.

  • A new content manager is created in the location after another user opts into Apps and Books.

  • Multiple VPP purchasers migrate to the same location.

For example: in Apple Business Manager, you have migrated subscription XYZ to a location that is non- unique, then only the unassigned licenses (available licenses) will migrate to the new location-based account. The assigned licenses (consumed) will still be associated with the legacy account. In this case, in ZENworks, all bundle assignments related to the existing subscription (that uses the legacy account) should be unassigned and transferred to the non-unique location. Thereafter, you need to create a new subscription in ZENworks to distribute the transferred licenses.

Procedure to migrate to location-based token in ZENworks if the location is non-unique

  1. In ZENworks, unassign all the bundles assignments associated with the subscription to which the legacy token is associated. Thereafter, refresh all devices and verify that all licenses are revoked and the Consumed License count for all apps is 0.

    or

    Delete the associated subscription and ensure that you select the Delete the replicated objects created by the subscription(s) checkbox. Re-create the subscription in ZENworks using the same legacy token, which will reset all licenses.

  2. Delete the subscription (existing or the new subscription created by linking the same legacy token) and ensure that you select the Delete the replicated objects created by the subscription(s) checkbox.

  3. In Apple Business Manager, navigate to Settings > Apps and Books. Transfer the unassigned licenses to the specific location.

  4. Download the token for that specific location.

  5. In ZENworks, create a new Apple VPP subscription and upload the newly downloaded location-based token.

When the new subscription is created, ZENworks syncs with Apple and all licenses transferred to this location will be identified and populated as available licenses in ZENworks. You can now create bundles and assign these licenses to specific devices or users.

When there are multiple subscriptions in the zone:

If there are multiple subscriptions in the zone, then based on the scenario, you can refer to the relevant procedure to migrate to location-based tokens: