Apple @ Work: ASBMUtil brings a native macOS app to the Apple Business experience

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Apple Business and Apple School Manager are essential for modern Apple device deployments. If you’re deploying Macs, iPads, or iPhones in the enterprise, you’ll spend a lot of time on these portals. The problem is that the web interface can be incredibly tedious when dealing with thousands of devices. As we’ve mentioned several times, Apple released an official API for these services last year, opening the door to automation and new tools. A new native macOS app called ASBMUtil is one of those examples.

About Apple@Work: Bradley Chambers managed an enterprise IT network from 2009 to 2021. Through his experience deploying and managing firewalls, switches, a mobile device management system, enterprise-grade Wi-Fi, thousands of Macs, and thousands of iPads, Bradley will highlight the ways Apple IT managers deploy Apple devices, build networks to support them, train users, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for IT departments.

Bringing the API to the desktop

Rod Christiansen recently released ASBMUtil, a native SwiftUI interface built to interact with your Apple business tools. Instead of struggling with JSON and terminal commands, Mac administrators can now interact directly with Apple’s enterprise API through a native app on their Mac.

The main view is a single native table with each managed device in your Apple Business and School Manager account. Macs, iPads, iPhones and Apple TVs are shown side by side. If you click on a row, a sidebar appears with complete device details, including serial number, order status, device management assignment, AppleCare coverage, and MAC address. You can easily select a handful of devices, right-click, and reassign them.

Device Browser: You can view all managed devices in a single, paged, sortable table with a details sidebar.
Powerful filters: You can filter by device status, order number, model family, or device management server. You can also stack filters to limit the view to the exact devices you need.
List of MDM servers and assignments: This allows you to see each server and what devices are currently assigned to it.
Mass allocation and deallocation: You can select multiple devices in the table, choose a destination server, and apply the change. You can also import a CSV if that’s how you get to the desired state.
Export to CSV or JSON: You can submit your selection or filtered results via the macOS share sheet.
Multi-profile switching: If you manage multiple Apple environments, you can easily switch between different instances of Apple Business and Apple School Manager from the sidebar and manage your credentials in settings.

Christiansen also kept the app perfectly in sync with Apple’s recent API additions. The app supports AppleCare coverage lookups (API 1.3) and can extract MAC addresses from built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet for macOS (API 1.4), as well as iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and visionOS (API 1.2). More recently, the app added support for API 1.5, which includes an array format for MAC addresses on devices with multiple network interfaces.

9to5Mac’s opinion

I love this app! I log in and out of Apple School Manager daily and having it in my dock saves me a lot of time. If you manage an Apple fleet, ASBMUtil is a utility you absolutely should add to your toolkit. You can get the latest version directly from GitHub.