Alternatives to Profile Manager

[alexpuk2002]

Hello All,

 

I am looking for some information into alternatives to profile manager to manage our Mac's and possibly our iPads. We currently have a 10.8 Mountain Lion setup on both the server and the Mac's running Workgroup Manager. At the moment this works great and does everything that we want, but we are looking into upgrading the server and the clients to El Capitan (10.11). I have set up profile manager to manager the Mac's and this work to some degree. It sets the dock to how we want and sets the wallpaper for students and teachers. We have also set restrictions on which apps the users can launch.

 

Now my problem is that while profile manager seems fairly simple to set up and it has worked, when I have come to deploy the image and test it more thoroughly, there are times where the settings don't get applied to the Mac's. It seems to be that profile manager is flaky and works sometimes and not others.

 

So this has led me to think about using an alternative to Profile Manager to manager our Mac's and maybe iPads. I have heard of the JAMF Casper Suite and was wondering what peoples experience of this is and also what the cost of this would be.

 

And if there are any other alternatives that are out there then please let me know and pass on your experiences with them.

 

Many thanks,

 

Alex

[Oddbod]

Jamf Casper is the way to go here… for managing your macs and idevices

[alexpuk2002]

I have seen that Casper looks to be very good and would manage the devices that we have. Would Casper work with active directory logins? At the moment we are using our active directory logins to login to the macs which has been working quite well for us on 10.8.

[Oddbod]

Yup… but don't take my word for it. try the free download. I should be getting training soon as it's a good replacement to Configurator 2. Oh, and Keiro’s offering has just gone to the paid model (so, no longer free)