About the new console

The Samsung Knox team would like to introduce you to the new console for Knox Manage. This console is a fork of the Knox Manage experience where you can operate the service in a completely new console interface embedded into the Knox Admin Portal, and which provides a self-guided workflow for new tenants to bring them up to speed as quickly as possible. If you’re a frequent user of the Knox Admin Portal, or are familiar with it, the new console will be much easier to integrate into your workflow, because it’s a member of the unified, single-pane-of-glass experience as the rest of Knox Suite.

Click and drag the handle at the bottom of the image to preview the differences between the two interfaces.

Benefits

As a wholly new core experience for Knox Manage, the new console is easy to use, helps you manage your devices efficiently, and supports the most essential features.

Single-pane-of-glass experience

As a component of the Knox Admin Portal, with the new console turned on, you can quickly complete successive tasks between multiple services — for example, managing an app’s configuration in Knox Manage, and then monitoring its usage in Knox Asset Intelligence — from a single surface.

As a consequence, the Knox Manage web console no longer has unique regional URLs separate from Knox Admin Portal. Whereas before, admins would use the console with a URL like us01.manage.samsungknox.com, there’s now only a single address — the same as the Knox Admin Portal — at central.samsungknox.com.

The centralized interface also offers shared management flows. For example, admin accounts are shared with other Knox Suite products, and all license operations across services can be performed on the same screen, with shared procedures between Knox products. A unified experience like this translates to fewer clicks, and more productivity for admins.

Modern interface

Borrowing from all the wins of the Knox Admin Portal, the new console is simple, clean, and efficient. It delivers the essential information for the task at hand and removes as many visual distractions as possible. One of the goals of this evolutionary interface was to eliminate redundancy between pages and cut down on the number of clicks needed to complete a task.

For example, system apps and regular apps are configured on different pages in the original console, making it harder for users to discover and access. With the new console, all app activity falls under the umbrella of your app library — a single place to coordinate all of your mobile application management.

You’ll see similar improvements to all areas of the console as more features are brought into the new console’s fold.

Self-guided tenant setup

When your tenant first activates the new console, the dashboard presents you with a self-guided setup that walks you through each step of setting up a basic tenant with groups, devices, profiles, and apps. Steps are laid out as a checklist that tracks your progress as you complete them, and each step provides contextual links to the next task, so you can learn the new interface from practical experience.

Use cases between the different consoles

Requirements

To try the new console, you need:

1. Special access provided by the Knox Manage team.
2. A Samsung account for your tenant. If you don’t have one, the Knox Manage team will assist you in setting one up.
3. A valid and active Knox Manage or Knox Suite license. If you don’t have one tied to your tenant already, the activation process will create one for you. The existing licenses activated in your tenant and assigned to your devices aren’t affected.

For a complete and in-depth list of requirements, see Requirements.

Switching between consoles

You can switch between the new console and the original console at any time. Doing so takes several moments, at most. If an admin is using one console but you switch to the other, their session may exhibit unexpected behavior, so it’s a good practice to notify your admins whenever you switch, so they can restart their sessions at the correct URL.

How the new console affects your tenant

For now, the new console is entirely optional. Switching is a non-destructive action, so it’s safe to do so on your production tenant.

Not all features are currently available, certain functions, in particular editing information provided by platforms that aren’t supported yet, aren’t available. To access the full feature set, you need to switch back to the original console.

The switching cost lies primarily in employee familiarity. The new console is a component of the consolidated Knox Admin Portal and Knox Suite paradigm, and in order to access it, admins need to sign in with a Samsung Knox account, which may necessitate adjustment of your identification, access, and authentication plan.

As more and more of the features and platforms are ported from the original console to the new console, the latter will eventually become feature-complete. While development is underway, both consoles will remain available, but after the new console has reached parity, it will become the primary experience.

Data retention and switching costs

There is little to no switching cost between the new console and the original console:

• All accounts, admins, devices, users, groups, apps, profiles, synced services, and all other data are preserved in the transfer.
• When using the new console, if there’s an entity or data type that isn’t supported or implemented yet, it’s presented as read-only.
• Both consoles are under active development, and there are no plans to regress the features and functionality of either.
• Admins unfamiliar with the Knox Admin Portal may require additional training and orientation in its use. The Samsung Knox team recommends that you and your admins read the Knox Admin Portal admin guide before making the switch.

Ongoing development and support

The new console is a key initiative for the Knox Manage team, and they want it to be as convenient and useful to you as possible. If you encounter any issues while using the new console, don’t hesitate to open a support ticket about it. Please make sure to include [The new console in Knox Manage] in the subject line, so the team can give it its due priority.