Today we are excited to deploy our next milestone release in Mac Device Management – the ability to upload and push your own configuration profiles to Mac workstations. It means you can now manage highly detailed Mac configurations at scale through RMM.

Back in January, we introduced Mac Device Management in RMM with Mac Agent v3.4. It means the RMM Mac agent works within the macOS environment and uses an Apple push notification certificate to handle Apple’s new security posture.

Without this capability, RMM services such as Managed Antivirus or Take Control that require kernel extensions or full disk access, would prompt the user for approval, for example when installing Managed Antivirus:

This is solved by enrolling your devices in RMM’s Mac Device Management solution. Now the user on the endpoint has to accept Mac Device Management enrollment just once (this is not something that can be scripted or done via remote tools like Take Control), and from there the RMM console takes over and you can deploy RMM features seamlessly in the background.  

The major new enhancement we’re announcing today is the ability for you to push your own Mac configuration profiles. You’ll see that the ‘Mac Device Management’ menu on the ‘Settings’ dropdown list now has sub menus:

• ‘Certificates’: This is where you populate the required Apple Push Notification certificates.

• ‘Profile Library’: Here you can upload your Mac configuration profiles. These are essentially XML files that conform to Apple’s configuration profile requirements.

Those profiles can be generated with any number of tools including Apple Configurator, and even profile building tools available on Windows 10 via the Microsoft Store. Some profiles can simply be found on Github. But wherever you get them from, they open up a world of configuration possibilities.  

For example, here’s a third-party tool to build a configuration profile that sets up screensaver lock:

• ‘Profile Deployment’: After you have uploaded any number of configuration profiles, you can deploy them to Macs that have completed enrollment. You can also remove profiles you pushed previously. You can select as many devices and profiles as you want to affect.

The profiles will appear in the ‘Profiles’ pane of ‘System Preferences’ on the Mac alongside those already pushed in support of RMM’s features such as Take Control.

We’re super excited about this major upgrade to RMM’s Mac monitoring and management capabilities. Better still, this is merely another milestone release in our journey of supporting Apple products. We are far from done with this project, but because the ability to push profiles is immensely powerful we wanted to get it in your hands quickly while we continue our work. Please use the ‘Feedback’ button in either of the new dialogs if you want to share any comments directly with the product team. 

In the meantime we hope you get great value out of this new capability.

Summary for Release
– Service release with support for Apple Configuration Profiles
– RMM Console v2020.09.16
– No agent release

RMM Console v2020.09.16
FEATURE: Support for Apple Configuration Profiles in Mac Device Management