The easiest way to bring devices to ADE and automatically enroll them is via your vendor. As long as your vendor supports ADE, the devices will automatically appear in the Business or School Manager after you purchased them. This means you never have to touch the devices to enroll them. This is the recommended method.

If your vendor does not support ADE you can add devices to the Business or School manager yourself. To manually add devices to ADE using the Apple Configurator. The Apple Configurator is available in a version for MacOS and for iOS. We highly recommend to use the iOS version of the Configurator to do this for an easy workflow and to avoid errors.

Since ADE, Configurator, Business Manager and School Manager are systems of Apple that are independent from the MDM you can follow Apples official Guide: https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/apple-business-manager/axm200a54d59/web

Additional Info not covered in the above guide:

The Configurator is mainly used to add Devices to the Apple Business or School Manager. Once you have done that and the devices are already in the Business or School Manager you no longer need to use the Configurator for the device. Doing so might cause problems and confusion.

After the device has been added to ADE you will see a prompt to “delete” (reset) the device on the device you want to enroll. This is NOT an error. This is the correct behavior. This means that the device has been added to ADE and it now needs to start the setup process from the beginning to use ADE.

Once the prompt to “delete” your device appears we recommend not touching the device for now. Instead you want to first navigate in the MDM to General Settings -> Apple Configuration -> ADE. Sync the ADE Token here. If the device is properly assigned in the Business or School Manager the number of devices will go up.

This is necessary for the MDM to know about the device AND for the MDM to configure what the device should do and where it should go.

Once the sync is done, tap on the “delete” prompt on your device. After that proceed to the setup normally (without Configurator). After the first 3~4 setup steps the device is showing the registration screen and it will contact apple to get the information from ADE. If everything is done properly you will see a screen regarding “Remote Management”. The device is now enrolled via ADE.

If you do not see the screen with “Remote Management” you maybe did something wrong. Check the following things:

• Make sure the device is assigned to the correct MDM server in the Business or School Manager.
• Make sure to sync the ADE Token BEFORE the device starts the registration.
• Make sure the device has an ADE Profile assigned. You can check that by going to Mobile Management -> Pools -> Apple ADE. Click on “Apple ADE” to see an overview on all ADE devices and their assigned ADE Profiles.