If your firm buys Macs, iPhones or iPads for work, Apple Business Manager is the piece that makes them manageable from the moment they come out of the box. Without it, Apple devices are just consumer kit you have to set up by hand. With it, a new Mac enrols itself into management before anyone touches it. Here is how to set it up from scratch.
What ABM gives you
Three things that matter. Zero touch enrolment, so a device bought for the company goes straight into Intune on first power on, supervised, with no manual steps. App buying in volume, so you push paid and free App Store apps to devices without Apple IDs or gift cards. And no wipe to enrol, because the device is tied to your organisation at the hardware level, not set up as personal first.
Setting it up
Enrol your organisation at business.apple.com, which Apple verifies with a phone call to confirm you are who you say. Once you are in, connect ABM to Intune as your MDM by swapping a token between the two, so devices in ABM know to enrol into your Intune. Then set Intune as the default MDM for your Macs and iOS devices, so anything that lands in ABM flows automatically into management.
Getting devices into ABM
This is the part people miss. A device only gets the zero touch treatment if it is in ABM, and it gets there one of two ways. Buy through Apple directly or an authorised reseller linked to your ABM, and new devices appear automatically. Or add existing devices by hand with Apple Configurator, which brings them in but starts a short provisional period the user can remove themselves from, so direct purchase is cleaner for anything important.
The gotchas
The enrolment token between ABM and Intune expires every year, and if it lapses new devices stop enrolling, so note the renewal. A device added by Configurator rather than bought into ABM gives the user a 30 day window to release it from supervision, which matters if the device holds company data. And decide your enrolment settings before the first device ships, because changing them later does not retie devices already out in the field.