Meraki MDM with Android or iPad

[ReverentCreature]

Hi there. Is anyone in North Kent using Meraki or similar MDM with Android or iPad tablets that would be willing to show off their solution?

 

From my initial researching it seems to be that iPads are easier to manage and lock down. Which will be good if we want to send out our own software to them, keep them standardised and operational. Android tablets are cheaper but we need to make sure we get a good spec. These are more likely to have bespoke solutions built into them.

 

Any advice welcome.

[Jamman960]

I'm using Meraki to manage our very limited(7!) ipad deployment and it seems to do exactly what we need it to do, once I can get hold of a mac mini I plan to setup Profile manager as well. during the deployment session at the recent Apple Education Leadership Summit a large Russian school(1200+ pupils) was using it to manage their fleet and appeared to be happy with it.

 

Regarding Android tablets - I've found many issues that would put me off attempting to integrate them until they release Google Play for Education here.

 

My main issues are:

 

1. No VPP equivilent - Apps need to be purchased for each ID and then can't be moved on, you also don't get any discount on bulk purchases(half price via VPP in qty's of 20+)

 

2. App support varies between devices and many review pages on apps are full of people proclaiming they don't work on their device - what happens if the device you've chosen is one of them?

 

3. Device support & OS Upgrades - Once a device is no longer current gen many vendors stop releasing firmware updates so 3 years down the line you may be running a very old version of android and who knows whether apps will continue to support it

 

Google Play for Education should solve some of these, I personally don't particularly like Apple products due to their lack of flexibility but in a way that's exactly why they're good in schools

[ReverentCreature]

Hi Jamman, That sounds really good. By "profile manager" do you mean configuring the iPad settings in iPhone Configurator software and then deploying that profile through Meraki to each iPad? Or do you mean something different? Thanks.

[enjay]

We have Meraki here, and it works okay for our iPads (it can be a little slow to get the updates out, though) but is proving very problematic with Android, as Meraki doesn't apply the proxy settings to the SSID, meaning students will need to do that manually.