User with two different devices

[Paul741]

Hi, I have a user that now will be assigned to have another corporate device, a smartphone (new assignment), while a tablet has already been deployed to him; both are Androids. I have set two different profiles for tablets and smartphones. So the question is how do I assign the proper profile<->device. The user is set to a tablet user group (which the tablet profile is linked to), I could assign him also to the smartphone user group but how do I let the system know to use the smarphone profile to the smartphone and the tablet profile to tablets?

Maybe I did the error to assign profiles to user groups, while I'd need to assign profiles to platform-based smart groups? But in that case I see I cannot filter anyway by platform device name (for example samsung SM-T395 that would be the precise tablet device name), so what's the deal??

Thank you.

[RicardoPachecoR]

So, you have User1 with a SmartPhone and a Tablet, both Android. Now you are in a bind because you have two profiles, one for phones and one for tablets. What are the differences for these two profiles?

Are the restrictions different due to device brand?

Can you test a single profile that will combine both into one?

If that works, and depending on the size of your deployment you could: combine them into one, or, create a new one and move all devices in phases to the new profile.

Smart groups could be an alternative based on device brand (if different) to keep two profiles. I don't rely on the Friendly Name option to identify devices for Smart Groups.

Tags? I try to stay away from tags for large numbers of devices. I mainly use tags to help filter out in Device List view. 

[Paul741]

Thanks for commenting. The two profiles differs mainly for the launcher, the tablets one has a launcher while the smartphones one does not. So I think it would be quite impossibile combine them into one profile; at best I might eventually be happy anyway with the tablets having no launcher, but I'll have to think more about this option.

Filtering by device brand is not a viable option for me, and I agree with you that also filtering by friendly name or tags is not an efficient way to do filters.

For me the best way to do smart filters would be by device name (Samsung SM-T395 for example) that indeed is fetched and available to the system (it's clearly there on the device page), but WHY THE HELL is not a selectable option in smart groups?? We get a ton of unusefull stuff for filtering and there is NO option for device name?!?! This is REALLY annoying, come on vmware!

[AlexanderMuc]

The smart groups have barely changed for 5 years. It also bothers us that Android cannot distinguish between smartphones and tablets, nor can you target a specific model.

You can work with a few values from the smart groups for this. But these are all workarounds that cannot be fully automated and may have other great disadvantages. Especially for a large number of devices there is no good solution.
- profile assignment and exclusions based on tags for the smartphone
- configure privacy settings for two different ownerships in the same way and use it to differentiate tablets/smartphones
- smart group with fixed devices
- separate tenant for smartphones

There is an old feature request for the smart groups and VMware is working on it. I (and a lots of other WS1-Admins) really hope that the smart groups will be modernized as soon as possible.
https://wsone-uem.ideas.aha.io/ideas/UEMCP-I-20

[Paul741]

Thank you for the info, good to know.