[Product Update] Introducing the Improved Signup Experience for Android Enterprise

[Lizzie]

Updated: July 2024 to include link to blog article*

Hello everyone,

We’re excited to announce improvements to our signup process for new Android Enterprise users. With this new signup experience, we've made it easier and more intuitive for businesses to deploy multiple Google products alongside Android Enterprise. 

Key benefits include:

• Simplified IT Admin Experience: IT admins can now sign up using their corporate email address, eliminating the need for Gmail accounts. This streamlined process reduces the risk of lost or deleted accounts and improves the overall management of credentials.
• Centralized Setup: Setup tasks, such as syncing users and configuring single sign-on (SSO), can now be performed centrally through the Google Admin console. These changes apply to multiple Google product deployments, saving you time and ensuring consistency across your IT environment.
• Seamless Upgrade Process: If you wish to add additional Google products (e.g Chrome Enterprise Upgrade for Chromebooks, Chrome Browser Cloud Management, Google Workspace) to your existing deployment, you can do so seamlessly without the need for separate registrations. Simply select the products you want to enable in Google Admin Console, and the products will be automatically enabled to your organization’s account.
• Enhanced flexibility and control: This improved signup experience allows you to bind multiple EMM instances to your customer account. This enables parallel testing of pre-production environments or phased migrations to a new EMM, providing greater flexibility and control over your IT infrastructure.

As we continue our commitment to delivering exceptional customer experiences, this improved signup process is designed to help your organization get the most out of Google’s enterprise products. Stay tuned for further updates from your EMM partner as this enhancement is rolled out for new Android Enterprise customers over the coming months.

*Learn more about this new sign-up flow in this Android Enterprise blog article: How we are making Android Enterprise signup and access to Google services better

Thanks,

The Android Enterprise Team

[govi]

Nice to see the improvements. Hope above mentioned few features also possible for the existing environment ?. 

[Lizzie]

Great to see your reply here @govi and that you are looking forward to this. In regards to your question, are there specific features you looking for in your existing setup?

[mattdermody]

Hi Lizzie,

What will happen if the user whose domain account is used for the initial setup and binding then leaves the company. While the shared generic Gmail account has come with it's own set of problems it at least has been useful in situations where the original admin leaves. I worry with personal domain accounts the original account holder could leave the company.

[Kumaresh90]

@Lizzie Hope you are doing good. I have a couple of questions:

1) Simplified IT Admin Experience: Does this include Google Zero Touch portal and Managed Google play/Android Enterprise binding accounts also?

2) Enhanced flexibility and control: Does this mean I can use the same account for binding multiple EMMs like SOTI/Intune or are we talking about multiple instances of same EMM here?

If we have private apps deployed using the same account, how does it gets distributed across EMMs using the account?

[jasonbayton]

@mattdermody with it being an enterprise domain it should be easier to recover if this happens, not least with Google support, but also the ownership of the domain can work around email routing and such. But obviously a stitch in time.. advise these are set up with multiple folks from get-go.

@Kumaresh90 ZT isn't included today, hopefully in future. Domain accounts can be added to ZT portal though.

Multiple instances and multiple EMMs 🙂

[Lizzie]

Hello everyone,

Just a quick note in case you haven't seen our recent blog article on the improved signup flow, here is the link: How we are making Android Enterprise signup and access to Google services better

The blog provides demo imagery of what to expect. 😀

Hope you find this useful. Let us know if you have any thoughts. 

Thanks,

Lizzie

[Kumaresh90]

Hey Lizzie,

Good to read the detailed blog article. Is there any technical documentation or demo video on the below?

"Finally, the improved signup experience will allow you to bind multiple enterprise mobility management (EMM) instances to your organization’s account, making it easier to use testing and production environments in parallel or transition to a new EMM vendor."

[Lizzie]

Hey @Kumaresh90,

Great to hear from you, I hope you are doing well. 

Glad you are finding these articles useful. As this will be rolling out later this year, I believe the team are currently working on technical documentations and working with partners. More updates will be coming on this from your EMM partners too.

I will also highlight your message back to our team working on this though and see if there is anything else they can provide here. 

To add, if you are interested in the binding of multiple enterprise (EMM) instances, you might find this article useful, it is from October last year. 

Speak to you soon. Thank you,

Lizzie

[DCreamer]

@jasonbaytonAny more news on adding SSO to the Zero Touch portal?
Our Company has mandated that all app/logins require 2FA and thus must have Okta SSO integration.
Our domain users are now unable to login to ZT because they are redirected to our SSO page by default.

[jasonbayton]

@DCreamer I'd direct that to @Lizzie for an official answer. 

I'd look at leaning on cloud identity/workspace hooked into okta to provision managed Google accounts for access to services like ZT (and others). 

If you've already got a bind there will be a migration in 2025 to the new sign-up flow and a Google enterprise environment. If you can't wait you could kick off your own instance.

Lizzie could highlight any risk with doing that but I would expect said migrations to support going into existing domains.