Assign, reassign, or unassign devices in Apple Business Manager
Your account contains a record of all the orders you have placed directly with Apple after March 1, 2011. Because accounts with participating Apple Authorized Resellers or carriers may not keep records going back to March 1, 2011, consult your participating Apple Authorized Reseller or carrier for your account’s order timeline.
Before you can assign devices, you must have entered your appropriate Apple customer number and/or communicated your Organization ID to a participating Apple Authorized Reseller or carrier and added their Reseller ID to your account. For information, see Manage device suppliers.
Note: When entering your Apple customer number, leave off any leading zeros.
Secure sensitive data
During the device configuration process, you can increase the security of sensitive data by ensuring that you have appropriate security measures in place. For example:
Have your users authenticate as part of the initial setup flow in the Apple device’s Setup Assistant during activation.
Provide a preliminary configuration with limited access and require additional device configuration in order to access sensitive data.
Device assignment (or reassignment) options
After an order ships, you can search for the order number and use it to assign devices to an authorized mobile device management (MDM) server. For example, when you place an iPad order for 5000 units, you can use the order number to assign all, or a specific number of, devices to an existing authorized MDM server. There are several ways to assign devices:
Device Management: You can reassign devices from one MDM server to another. For example, you may want to spread the load of 10,000 devices from one single MDM server to three or four.
Source: You can assign devices from different sources. For example, you may purchase all iPhone and iPad devices from one source and all Mac computers from another. The sources are:
Apple (Apple Customer Number)
Apple Authorized Reseller or carrier
AppleCare (for replaced devices)
Apple Configurator 2 (for devices added manually)
Order number: Assigning devices by order number makes sense if a single MDM server is used for an entire device deployment (or a single order) and if devices are still in their original packaging and are going directly to the users.
Device Type: You can assign devices by type and model to a specific MDM server. This method makes sense if the devices you need to assign are all managed in an identical manner. You can search for device types using the search field at the top of the window.
Storage size: You can assign devices by how much storage they came with when purchased or manually enrolled. For example, you may want to assign all MacBook Pro computers with 1 terabyte of storage to an MDM server used by your graphics department.
Serial number: You can paste up to 1024 serial numbers from a text file, with each serial number separated by a comma.
Assign, reassign, or unassign devices
In Apple Business Manager
, sign in with an account that has the role of Administrator or Device Enrollment Manager.Click Devices in the sidebar, search for a device in the Search field, then select the device from the list. See How to search.
After you’ve searched for the devices, select the total number of devices at the top of the list, then click
.Do one of the following:
Choose Assign to server, then choose the MDM server you want to assign or reassign the device to.
Choose Unassign to unassign the device from an MDM server.
Note: If you select a device that is unassigned, you won’t see the unassigned option.
Click Continue.
Carefully read the dialog, then click Continue.
A new activity generates a list of the devices that are assigned or reassigned to the selected MDM server or unassigned from an MDM server. You can wait for the activity to complete, or click Close to close the window.