Disabling iOS 7 Activation Lock in an enterprise environment.

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Level 1

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Disabling iOS 7 Activation Lock in an enterprise environment.

I'm wondering if anyone has found a solution for disabling the new Activation Lock feature in iOS 7 without needing to supervise the device through Apple Configurator? My dilemma is we have about 50 iPhones deployed in our company. The only way I have found to disable the Activation Lock feature is to supervise the device using Apple Configurator. However, if the device is supervised, the user cannot sync it with iTunes on their computer. A lot of our users do sync their iPhones to keep backups, transfer photos, etc. So the way I see it, I am left with two choices:

We supervise all of our iPhones and tell our users they can't sync with iTunes anymore.
We leave them unsupervised and make a policy that whenever we have to wipe a device we make the user disable Find My iPhone first.

Has anyone found a better solution to this? Also if we ever get in a situation where a user leaves the company and they did not disable Find My iPhone, can we send the iPhone back to Apple and have them wipe it? Or would we be left with a nice expensive paper weight?

iOS 7

Posted on Oct 28, 2013 2:29 PM

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Answer 1

KiltedTim

Level 10

195,429 points

Oct 29, 2013 11:53 AM in response to kgraves83

We just stopped providing phones and instead, cover a set amount of their monthly wireless bill.

If I were in your shoes, I'd offer 2 choices:

1. The same as #1 in your post.

2. Let them bring their own device.

Either you have complete control over it (via the configurator), or no control beyond the ability to wipe the data from a device connected to your Exchange server, require a passcode, etc. That can all be done without the need to supervise them using the configurator.

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Answer 2

Dec 4, 2013 8:01 AM in response to kgraves83

I am sure you have seen by now that you can use AC to prepare a device using the "Allow devices to connect to other Macs" setting to handle your request.

If you want to later change this, just email/post/sync a new profile to a supervides device using teh Restriction payload to modify the "Allow pairing with non-Configurator hosts (supervised only)." setting.

Good luck.

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