Forum Discussion
Device enrolled in different company
Got a strange one; i have a Honeywell Ct60, android 10.0, that i have had for years as a test device. This week i began testing a new app update. i wiped the device and enrolled it into my MDM, Wor...
Hi Matt,
i think the issue is somehow different in case what you describe.
If you send Zebra devices to repair, the owner has to remove them entirely from the ZTP (that's what Zebra is requesting in their repair policies). They did check in the past (i don't know how or maybe just because of the behavior of the device) if they are still in there and then don't repair.
As said, i don't know if they were able to check. But in our case they didn't repair then and we got the devices back or informed by the repair center.
The reason is simple: It may happen that the main PCB (which is holding the serialnumber or IMEI) maybe swapped entirely and later being repaired and reused.
And thats the moment your described behavior can happen if no one checked if the device, where the main PCB should be swapped, is registered in the ZTP and need to be removed/replaced with the new SNR/IMEI.
I think it's not "fat fingers" (always) but more likely not following the repair agreements.
Just as a note: We also needed then always write to our resellers the old and new SNR/IMEI to get them replaced in our ZTP (because we encounter similar procedure for other manufacturers as well).
@Google: It would be nice if manufacturers could do that directly and (sry) forced to do that in case of a main PCB swap where IMEI/SNR is changing and not the old one flashed onto during repair process.
I think you may be right. Upon further investigation these were devices that were correctly enrolled into the right ZTE portal originally but then were not uninenrolled correctly before being reallocated to a different customer.
Agreed that the Manufacturers handling these repair contracts should be able to manage the Zero Touch enrollments on behalf of the end customers while devices are in repair. Otherwise we're stuck with the friction of having to deregister devices before they are sent in for repair. That is currently a bottleneck since the people with access to ZTP are almost never the same people that are processing repairs at a local site level in a distributed environment like retail stores or warehouses.
KBAs like this illustrate this point:
I won't recommend ZTE to any customer with fully managed line of business device until that friction can be eliminated from the process by enabling the manufacturers to also co-manage ZTP. There is unnecessary overhead in managing the deregistration around the repair process and that effectively negates the "zero touch" concept. It may be zero touch of the device for an EMM admin but it is 15-20 taps for an end user enrolling a device through the SUW and then extra overhead of managing registrations and deregistrations in the portal. I honestly thing the value of ZTE is overstated and the name "Zero Touch" is a misnomer.
