I thought I would do a quick blog post about the enrollment of iOS 9.3 devices into VMware Workspace One (WS1). iOS 9.3 is the last release for several versions of devices. Well there are many iOS devices still out there that use iOS 9.3.x, which means if you are doing mobile device management (MDM) in your organization you may run into something that I ran into this week.
I’m going to say this up front… iOS 9.3 is supported with WS1 9.6. In fact support goes all the way back to iOS 7. (If you are on iOS 7, if at all possible consider upgrading to iOS 9 it provides a lot of great functionality.) And if you are an end user reading this blog because your IT team said your device is to old point them to the VMware documentation…
That said, here’s what I ran into. When enrolling an iOS 9.3 device with the AirWatch Agent. I would make it to step 5 in the list. At which point it would launch a safari web browser to get to the AirWatch MDM site for the organization, so that the device can download a MDM profile. Once it got to the site the progress bard would only progress to about 66% then it would stop responding. If you tried to do anything safari would crash and you would need to restart the enrollment process from the beginning.
This was on a clean iOS device that had been rebooted prior to installing the AirWatch agent. What could be wrong… After verifying it wasn’t an ID10T error with the user the next step was to clear the cache for the browser. To do this, go to settings, scroll down to Safari and tap on it, lastly scroll down to “Clear History and Website Data” and tap on that. This clears the cache and should hopefully fix any issues with stale files that haven’t aged off.
That of course didn’t work for the user. What could be the problem??? What else to try… I had the user try rebooting the iOS device after clearing the Safari cache. This time tings proceeded past step 5 and the device was able to download and install the MDM profile and finished the rest of the enrollment process.
That’s right if you run into an issue with your AirWatch enrollment try clearing the cache and then rebooting the device.
Yup, its that line from the IT Crowd… “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”
The interesting thing about all of this is the user was me. I was enrolling an iOS device and this bit me. I thought I would share in case you’ve been bit by this as well.
May your servers keep running and your data center always be chilled.
