AaronFreimark
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Tekserve CTO speaks out on the trouble with managing iPad business migrations
Macworld has a fascinating interview up with Aaron Freimark, the CTO of NYC's well-loved independent Apple retailer Tekserve. Freimark's current job is to help companies do something we've talked about here quite a few times before: implement iPhones and iPads into their business environments. When the iPad first arrived, any inclusion in a workplace was fairly novel, but these days, iPads are used in lots of various industries and workflows, and Freimark is helping companies figure out best practices and plans for how to implement Apple's products in their business. It turns out there are quite a few complications in deploying iPads on a large scale, which Freimark and his team continue to try and figure out. Each device needs to have an Apple ID connected to it, he says, but of course that ID can match up to one specific person, rather than the company at large, so coordinating those numbers can be a pain. (The alternative, having one Apple ID for all the deployed devices, would mean that employees would have a hard time customizing their iPads with apps they choose.) Just buying the apps as well can be an issue -- when a company wants to buy something like 50,000 copies of one app for distribution, it can be hard for both Apple and the company to get payment across in the right way. Even Apple's VPP program for business app buying is not a panacea. And Freimark says that even when companies decide to take the leap into iPad deployment and run a pilot program, that program can often end up being messier than it needs to be, and might convince the company that it shouldn't have tried to include Apple's device in the first place. Tekserve is doing its best to help companies smooth over that process, and I'm sure that as we see more and more large companies integrate the iPad in their businesses (and Apple makes even better tools for doing so), the whole process will become easier over time. Freimark also mentioned that he collaborated with Greg Moore on an AppleScript technique for creating those thousands of Apple IDs automatically, rather than manually. You can check out the script on the Enterprise iOS site.
Origin Stories: Tekserve
Tekserve is a much-beloved Apple repair and sales shop in Manhattan. Our own Mike Rose has been a customer, and profiled the shop a little while ago. In the video below, I speak with Tekserve's CTO, Aaron Freimark about how Tekserve began, and a short history of Manhattan's longest-open Apple shop. Happy 25th anniversary, Tekserve!
