Ipad deployment dilemma

[jimbopembo]

Some of the Primary schools that we support have bought batches of Ipads recently, and some are looking at buying some. Typically, they are wishing to buy up to 20, which will be housed in a mobile trolley. Buying a synching trolley and a Mac so that I can supervise 20 netbooks seems excessive.

Should I deploy with configurator, or should I take the MDM route? Or both?

Does the Apple Device Enrolment Programme due here soon allow you to supervise your Ipads without needing a Mac?

Our Local Authority (Lancs) has recently moved to Lightspeed, and are going to offer the MDM as a freebie so is this an option worth considering?

Essentially, I need to be considering if I should be telling my schools to buy a Mac and a syncing trolley with their Ipads, or to save the money??

 

Any pointers would be much appreciated

[tmoon-mint]

From what I could gather devices purchased from Apple using the Apple Device Enrolment Programme arrive already supervised and setup for use, however until it becomes available in the UK I cannot confirm this, anyone else had experience using it?

 

As far as management is concerned, I have never had an issue relying completely on MDM (we use Meraki) instead of Apple Configurator. The price tag of buying a Mac just doesn't seem to be justifiable to me when MDM solutions work just as well from my experience with iPads.

[Jwzg]

Use configurator to supervise and apply an image along with the MDM profile. Then use Lightspeed to assign to groups. I don't know how the current setup on 7.1 works, as I'm just now testing it myself, but this is how we've done it in the past.

[Brimstone]

From what I could gather devices purchased from Apple using the Apple Device Enrolment Programme arrive already supervised and setup for use, however until it becomes available in the UK I cannot confirm this, anyone else had experience using it?

 

As far as management is concerned, I have never had an issue relying completely on MDM (we use Meraki) instead of Apple Configurator. The price tag of buying a Mac just doesn't seem to be justifiable to me when MDM solutions work just as well from my experience with iPads.

 

Currently the only way to create and install a supervised profile is to use Configurator, until DEP arrives I would recommend having a Mac to do this with, you can also mass deploy the enrol profile to iPads from Lightspeed via Configurator so would definitely go for this as well.

[seawolf]

Currently the only way to create and install a supervised profile is to use Configurator, until DEP arrives I would recommend having a Mac to do this with, you can also mass deploy the enrol profile to iPads from Lightspeed via Configurator so would definitely go for this as well.

 

+1 to that. This is the way to go for you @jimbopembo.

 

Just remember to select the distribution codes (spreadsheet) option if you are using VPP to buy any apps if you want to distribute them with Configurator. You can always have them converted for VPP distribution via MDM later, but can't go the other way around. For free apps, you only have the VPP distribution code option, which only works with MDM, but you can just "buy" those using any iTunes account to install them using configurator.