Switching to Absolute Manage: Customer Story

Stephen Dolphin has been chronicling his experiences with MDM services on his personal blog. In October 2011, he talked about the challenge of managing iPhones for nearly 100 people and how using the free "find my iPhone" app was impractical, given each would require its own logins. Based on this and other benefits, he began researching options.

One year after implementing one option for MDM, Stephen ran into some issues that made him re-examine his choice: "due to some issues we couldn’t do a local install and were forced to take SaaS, which meant that we weren’t able to integrate with Active Directory in quite the same way that we wanted."

Here's what Stephen had to say about his migration to Absolute Manage for Mobile Devices:

"Having recently been awestruck by the awesomeness of Absolute’s Computrace product (never lose a laptop again!) we discovered that they also offered MDM and wanted to do a quick comparison.

In Absolute’s favour:

• Cost: Absolute Manage for Mobile Devices is cheaper
• Integration: Unlike with my intial issue with AirWatch we can install Absolute locally and therefore all the Active Directory stuff just works, with AirWatch we were making profiles for each user due to the complication of linking back to Active Directory from a SaaS host
• Better apps: The AbsoluteApps and AbsoluteSafe are very nice and work much better than the AirWatch App (which kept being updated without any sort of communication from AirWatch, a real issue for me! Additionally, as we have an Enterprise License for Apple Development they offer a service whereby you can sign their app with your signature and install it directly onto devices without users needing iTunes accounts – very handy for setup!

AirWatch are still better in one respect:

• UI: The AirWatch web UI for editing profiles is nice, Absolute get you to use the iPCU which makes sense as Apple change things a lot, but the AirWatch interface is nicer even if there’s a slight delay updating it following new releases (not that I ever noticed one)

All in all the installation and setup felt well-practiced and considered, we had the pre-reqs document early, did all the work and then just had the installation performed remotely, did a test enrol and it worked fine!"

Thanks for the feedback Stephen and we will do our best to continue to support your MDM needs now and in the future!