[android] Managing Android Based Tablets - Way Forward?

[Sam_Brown]

Primary school I'm involved with is looking to buy 70 Samsung Galaxy Tabs. Believe they are also getting 3 charge and sync stations as well.

 

Does anyone have any experience with managing Android Devices? I'm sure there are MDMs available out there but I've no idea what's good and what's bad. Any recommendations? Also depending on price of MDM... Are there any Apple Configurator type solutions out there that will let me sort out the devices en masse?

[Tesla]

Meraki supports Android devices, but if you are working behind a proxy (which i assume you are) it is problematic as most apps dont utilise the proxy settings in android....

[Sam_Brown]

Ah yes. Unfortunately well aware of issues with Tablets (iPads mainly) and their inability to deal with proxies. Transparent proxy here though luckily.

 

We can set a range of IP Addresses to not require authentication and stick student filtering on it so proxy hopefully won't be an issue. I'll have a look at Meraki - Any rough idea on pricing at all? Just purely doing some really early research. Also how stringent is the licensing for Android apps? Have to purchase each app once per device? I'm assuming that's another cost they've not thought factored into the budget for this little project!

[Tesla]

Meraki is completely free. We use it here for iPads while we dont have money spare for a mac and apple configurator xD

[Sam_Brown]

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm signing up for it now and will give it a trial. You're awesome.

 

Sam

[Tesla]

Good luck as i said i know it can do it, i don't know much abnout how it handles android devices etc though, but i couldn't enrol the device using the Meraki app as it didnt use the proxy....i could try it at home, but who wants to take their work home with them!

[fairm010]

Only thing is is Meraki doesnt provide much functionality for Android, mainly iOS.