Apple Business Essentials

Formerly Fleetsmith

Fleetsmith is well suited for companies with a lot of Macs, Mac minis, Apple tvs, etc., that are all over the place (different offices, states, countries, floors, remote employees, etc). It makes the management of these central where it would be almost impossible otherwise.

THERE IS NO VPP. MAC IS NEEDED TO PROPERLY CONFIGURE DEVICES.

Fleetsmith is best for newly purchased machines being given to a single user. Excellent for portable computers. It's not as well suited to shared machines, computer lab or kiosk type scenarios, etc. Fleetsmith doesn't really manage iOS or tvOS, either, but if they added this functionality in a competitive way, we have a fleet of both that I'd consider moving!

For startups that need to manage Macs and are not ready for their first IT FTE this is a great product. I'm not a traditional IT person but Fleetsmith has helped me manage the laptops at our company effectively. When we are big enough to hire a full time IT manager Fleetsmith has us set up nicely to scale rapidly.

Shout out to Dave Vega who was our account manager until recently. In the beginning, Dave took the time to understand our needs and explain where Fleetsmith would fit or not fit. He was always responsive for account questions and he would also help with technical questions as well. Dave was never overly pushy on anything and genuinely wanted to make sure Fleetsmith was serving the current needs of Manifold. Thanks, Dave!

My sense is that Fleetsmith is a good fit for use cases where the organization is already invested in G Suite as a directory service, and where best-effort configuration management is acceptable. I don’t know that I would trust Fleetsmith in an environment where strict compliance was of paramount importance; Fleetsmith’s design seems to be to choose to “fail open” rather than “fail closed”.