Managing your Devices in Afaria

Afaria is an enterprise Mobile Device Management (MDM) software for securing and managing corporate and personal devices with a company's enterprise policies.  Devices include mobile 'feature' phones, smartphones, tablets, laptop and others.

Afaria policies let you provision and enroll devices, define device settings, secure devices and data, collect hardware/software inventory, distribute consumer and enterprise apps to mobile devices and software packages to laptop or desktops, and collect device activity for telco expense management.

The MDM experience starts with enrolling your device into Afaria.  Enrollment is adding unmanaged devices to Afaria device management. Enrollment is complete when a device has connected to its Afaria and received policies.

Depending on the device type, various option are available to enroll devices and start managing them with Afaria. These options include the Afaria Self-Service Portal, Afaria client applications, and  enrollment policies, codes and code URLs.

Afaria uses policies to manage devices. Enrollment, Application and Configuration policies are detailed below.

In order to enroll a mobile device into MDM, a mechanism is needed to connect a device to a company’s Afaria server, collect additional information from the end user, and assign appropriate groups for that user and device. This is achieved using Enrollment Policies.

Enrollment Policies define provisioning details and

• establish connectivity parameters for a given Afaria server & allow for assignment to pre-determined groupings.
• are used with the Self Service Portal (SSP) or when users enroll their own devices by installing an Afaria client.

These How-To Guide (Android, iOS) describe the steps one would follow in order to create an enrollment policy for devices.

Below videos show how to use enrollment policies to define provisioning details for devices.

Application policies are used for populating the Afaria Application Portal: they define commercial and enterprise application packages, determining which applications are available for end users to install.

In this How-to Guide (Android, iOS) we use the SAP Mobile Platform Hybrid Web Container to illustrate application configuration, in addition to the basic app policy.

Configuration policies allow administrators to ensure that enrolled devices, which access company resources such as email, Wi-Fi and documents, are protected by an approved set of security policies on the device. Configuration policies also define device settings and options, and collect device hardware/software inventory and activity expense management data

The configuration policies are usually mapped to corporate policies, and can be applied to corporate and personal devices alike.

These How-to Guide (Android, iOS) provides an overview of steps that one would follow to create configuration policies for devices on SAP Afaria.

Check out these videos for to learn our Configuration Policies define device settings and options, and collect device hardware/software inventory & device activity data.

Enrollment codes simplify connecting a device to Afaria for enrollment. Enrollment codes are available for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows Mobile devices.

The codes are short codes that are easy for users to enter on the Afaria application on their device. You can communicate enrollment codes to users directly or they can get an enrollment code from the Afaria Self-Service Portal. The user interface and the provisioning details you defined in the enrollment policy drives the rest of the interaction.

An Afaria groups are similar to using groups and organizational units to simplify network resource management in IT operations.  In Afaria, groups are linked to devices and policies.

• A variety of group types are available.  Define group links based on manual selection of individual or group of devices (e.g. All iOS devices), dynamic selection of devices based on device attributes (e.g. device ID), and dynamic selection of devices based on user groups for users who have devices.  You can also define a group that is composite of multiple groups.
• Groups are explicitly linked to policies.  

In order to further familiarize yourself with Afaria, please watch the following instructional videos.

• Decommision of device - Learn how to fully complete the device management lifecycle by understanding how to identify ownership of the device, perform a remote lock, passcode reset, and selective or remote wipe of a device