VMware rolls out extensive iOS declarative device management capabilities in Workspace ONE tech preview

In June 2021, we posted our first blog about Apple’s Declarative Device Management (DDM), a full-on paradigm shift in Apple device management that was announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that year. You can review the post to learn more about Apple’s move away from “imperative” device management to “declarative,” and what it means for the future of Apple device management. Additional resources that can bring you fully up to speed on DDM are included at the bottom of this post. 

We won’t reexamine the inner workings of DDM here, except to say in brief that it allows devices to be autonomous and proactive in their managed state — device state changes can automatically trigger reactions, management logic becomes self-applied, and updates are asynchronously sent to Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management (UEM). 

This is a quicker and more efficient way of doing things because the server isn’t constantly polling tens of thousands of devices to check their status. And once DDM is fully rolled out, Workspace ONE UEM customers will see substantial improvements in performance and scalability, as well as a more accurate view of the current live state of each device. 

Since Apple’s initial announcement, we’ve been in development working to deploy DDM for Workspace ONE. Our first iteration of capabilities will be delivered on iOS (with DDM for Mac in our sights as well), and it focuses on the Declarations pillar of the framework. More specifically, we’re rolling out two of the four components of Declarations: Configurations and Assets. 

Workspace ONE UEM supports declarative configurations  

We have talked previously about our incredible new data-driven user interface (DDUI) and how we can release new features faster because we no longer need to make code changes to add new features to the profile-builder UI. Because of this, in this tech preview Workspace ONE UEM supports all available DDM Configurations as follows:  

• Passcode  
• CalDAV  
• CardDAV  
• LDAP  
• Calendar Subscriptions  
• Exchange  
• Email  
• Google Account  

Workspace ONE UEM supports declarative assets  

In DDM, Assets are a Declaration sub-type that define user-specific information and are referenced by Configurations. Workspace ONE UEM supports the User Identity Asset in this tech preview, which you can leverage to define a user’s full name and email address to any referenced Configuration, eliminating the need for manual entry.  

Note: In a future update to this tech preview (coming very soon), Workspace ONE UEM will also support the Authentication Credentials Asset, which describes username and password.  

Learn more about how to test DDM and tell us about it! 

Take a look at the following video where we’ll walk you through how to create and manage both Assets and Configurations, and then show you how they function when deployed to a managed device.  

Sign up for the Declarative Device Management tech preview on our VMware Anywhere Workspace Early Access^™ Program portal here.

Once you’ve tested the capabilities on our Early Access Program portal, please give us your feedback using the links to report any issues you encounter or submit questions or ideas for improvement based on what you see and learn!  

We look forward to your testing and feedback. Note that this is only our first phase of DDM support, and we will continue to expand our feature set over the coming months. Stay tuned for more updates! 

Additional resources 

Learn more about DDM via the following resources: 

Check out this video from VMware Explore 2022, titled “What’s New in Mobile Endpoint Management with Workspace ONE UEM,” where Adam Henry, Product Manager for iOS, goes into greater detail on the subject. You’ll need a VMware ID to view this video. If you don’t already have one, you can register for one in the VMware Explore Video Library. 

Here’s our original post about DDM from June 2021, titled “All the Enterprise Updates from Apple WWDC 2021, and What They Mean for Managing iOS 15, macOS Monterey and More.”

Here’s a link to Apple’s video introducing DDM during WWDC 2021, titled “Meet Declarative Device Management.”