Ipad invasion

[strawberry]

For reasons beyond my control it appears that some of our staff will be getting the gift of an ipad. It will be largely useless to them other than they wont need to remember that pesky windows password as I know diddly all about teaching/using/playing with Ipads.

 

So, Can anyone point in the direction of which hardware/training I should be requesting/fiddling with to get upto speed and maybe provide some services to these dear dear machines?.

 

I've had alook at RM and neos for training, but am open to all ideas and any books that anyone can recommend

[ste1988]

When this happened here, i requested one for myself firstly. If you actually want to manage these at all you will definitely need to go down with root of macbook pro/mac mini with server on and take full advantage of profile manager.

 

Training wise, there is plenty of here now to get you up and running and managing ipads, a few years ago you would of had a real nightmare, but apple have certainly developed their software well, and profile manager is getting better every time it gets an update.

[APMerry]

I was in your situation the summer before last. Best thing I can suggest is get yourself one and play, play play. If they're just for staff then I cant imagine there's a great deal to manage in terms of restrictions. You just need to decide how you want to manage the Apple ID's and the Apps they're buying. Obviously you don't want to be putting the school credit card info onto a staff apple ID as you know what people are like with passwords. When we first gave iPads to staff it was as a trial, we bought some iTunes vouchers and gave every department an apple ID with £20 on for them to buy some apps.

 

I've been using Meraki to manage profiles on them, but I'm planning on an overhaul of the iPads as I keep seeing people say (as above) that apple have improved this side of things a lot.

[marekbrad]

We are a 1:1 iPad school for both staff and students.. happily have you on a visit sir :-)

[woody]

Definitely the FIRST thing to do is set up a Meraki account (free) and register the ipads in there. At least then you have some management and can change things later if need be. I am presuming they will want email on them so you will want to enforce a lock code to make them more secure.

[free780]

Before all that do you have a managed wifi deployed. Will your proxy server work on ipads? How will auth work?

[APMerry]

Before all that do you have a managed wifi deployed. Will your proxy server work on ipads? How will auth work?

 

That's an excellent point! We had endless trouble with our proxy server and authentication, the iPad likes asking for your credentials over and over again. We ended up getting a smoothwall and setting up a transparent proxy, a lot of Apps don't like proxy settings so a transparent proxy is the way to go.

[CamelMan]

You could always get someone in.

 

We had a company called AT Computers come into do the original setup (upgrade Mac to ML, set up configurator and image all the Ipads to our spec). Not cheap but will get you up and running with minimal stress. They were happy for us to sit with them and go through it all so we knew what we are doing.

 

Got all the work done in 2 days - still not happy with some of the security (or lack of) but thats an Ipad thing rather than an setup issue!

[free780]

Yeah we had to resort to unauthenticated proxy and keep track of mac address and devices. Such a pain. We have a guest network. It has a transparent proxy which means no ssl. :-(

[strawberry]

Thanks for all the replies guys. Very useful!

[jallsop]

If its part of a school with a windows client network, maybe also consider other MDM software. We are moving in the iPad direction, as some of the apps out there for teaching and learning are very very good. We're considering Filewave as a possible part to our solution, as you can manage different devices on different OS's too.