How does a business use the Mac App Store

[blackcrayon]

Final Cut Pro X

Well I guess we won't have to wait until Lion to have to deal with this. Now that Final Cut Pro X is released, *only* on the Mac App Store. And i imagine a very large % of Final Cut Pro users are in corporate environments.

The way we are attempting to handle this with iPads is to create an Apple ID for each iPad. I'd hate to have to create an Apple ID for each of our macs though (150 or so of them). And yes that would become massively impractical. It might work for 10 copies of Final Cut Pro, but I have no idea how we will handle it if we decide to site license the next version of iWork. Hopefully Apple will bring their Volume Purchase system over to corporate (right now it's education only, and might be iOS only as well).

 

[N9YTY]

I could live with the App Store if they would simply allow license management. Yes, it is a royal pain to maintain a plethora of Apple ID's for all the computers or users, but that is inevitable for the iOS devices anyway.

Apple's official answer is that these stores are designed for consumers only. The best they can offer is to purchase all items with a primary business account and then "gift" the subordinate accounts with the appropriate amount of money so that they can make the purchase. Despite the extra work involved, that actually wouldn't be TOO bad except that you have no provision in there to later TRANSFER the license from one installed Apple ID to another.

Our environment will frequently see workloads change, and someone who does A, B and C may later be doing A, F and G. So the software for task B and C needs to move to someone else, and they need to get new or transferred licenses for tasks F and G.

Allowing primary accounts with subordinate Apple ID's and the ability to manage licenses amongst those ID's via transfers, including reporting of which ID's have which software assigned and which software is assigned to which ID's, is really crucial to proper management from an IT perspective, at least from here.

I've submitted this via feedback to Apple as well as in direct email to the "senior" support reps I was referred to five or six layers deep. Unfortunately their answer has repeated been that the App store is for consumers and they seem to have little REAL interest in trying to address the centralized needs of a business.

 

[bdkennedy1]

I believe Apple thinks that businesses are going to be honest. Therefore, you would simply call Apple to get a license for the amount of users you have, then use the Lion disk image on a USB drive or burn the image to a DVD and deploy it like you would with Snow Leopard.

 

[Nikh]

Just today Apple sent to developers a letter about selling apps in volume:

Get ready today. Business customers will soon be able to buy your apps in volume. Click through the latest Paid Applications Agreement so that your apps will be offered for sale when the Volume Purchase Program is available to businesses.
Custom B2B Apps
Through the Volume Purchase Program, you'll be able to sell custom B2B apps to your business customers. Custom B2B apps provide tailored solutions to address specific business needs. Get a head start on developing custom B2B apps today.