How to seamlessly test and update enterprise apps without affecting productivity?

Description

In most organizations, dedicated in-house apps are a part of the workforce, used by employees regularly. In such a scenario, updating such critical enterprise apps becomes a critical task all by itself. Ideally, organizations would want the apps to be completely tested before deploying it in the production environment. MDM lets you test and deploy such critical enterprise apps as explained below:

Pre-requisites

• If the app is a part of any policy such as Kiosk, do not modify/update the policy before testing the app.

Steps

• On the MDM server, click on Device Mgmt from the top menu and select Groups and Devices from the left pane.
• Click on Create Group as explained here and add a minimal number of devices to the group. This group will act as the test bed for this enterprise app update. It is recommended to have a few devices enrolled with MDM not being used in production environment, to act as test devices in case of subsequent policy and/or app updates in the future.
• Once the group is created, click on App Repository from the left pane. Click on the ellipsis icon present below Action against the enterprise app which needs to be updated. Click on Modify App from the dropdown.
• Now, update the enterprise app as explained here(iOS, Android and Windows). Once the app is saved, it gets added to the App Repository and is ready for distribution. Distribute the updated enterprise app to the newly created group as explained here.
• After distribution, the app needs to be installed on the device. MDM lets you install apps silently on Android and iOS devices.
• Once the apps have been installed, you can have the enterprise app tested on these devices.

If you're using enterprise apps, it is reccomended you test the policy too, as explained in the below steps where a Kiosk policy used as an example.

• Replicate the Kiosk profile distributed to the devices in production environment and distribute it to the same testbed group.
• Now, the test devices are provisioned under Kiosk with the updated enterprise app, which can now be tested.
• Once tested satisfactorily, you can distribute the updated Kiosk policy incrementally to groups, one after one or if you have only one group, select smaller subset of devices in the group and then distribute the profile.
• Thus, distribute the updated Kiosk profile to all the devices in production environment incrementally.