Meraki Blocking App Installs - Any MDMs that allow pushed apps not app store?

[scubagirl]

Hi all,

 

We use the free (old, unsupported) version of Meraki at our school which works fine for the most part. We're looking at the possibility of switching MDM's over the summer hols but are in a kind of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' sort of situation. Especially when some MDMs are ridiculously expensive and we're okay with a free version atm.

 

The main problem I have is that our Head wants to stop pupils from downloading apps and only allow apps that have been pushed out via Meraki/VPP. The trouble is, when we choose not to allow installing apps in their profile, it removes their app store, therefore also prevents their iPad from receiving pushed out apps!

 

Does anyone else have this issue? If so, how did you get around it? Do you have an MDM that allows management of this kind of situation?

 

Many thanks for anyone who can help,

 

Jo

[PR-UK]

We have the same experience with the legacy Meraki.

 

With up to date MDMs they seem to have changed things around slightly and it now seems to be possible to allow installing apps but remove the app store. e.g. in OSX Profile Manager you get "Allow Installing Apps using Apple Configurator and iTunes" but also "Allow installing apps using App Store (supervised only)".

 

An MDM we were testing last week we were able to use the new 9.3 functionality to hide the app store icon and allow apps to be installed. We tried getting Siri to take us to the App Store as well as going to websites that have the App banner and nothing was able to get back to the App Store once it was hidden.

 

We're still testing at the moment though with the intention of swapping out MDM over the holidays.

Edited May 16, 2016 by PR-UK

[scubagirl]

Thanks PR-UK, that's really useful to know. We've moved away from Profile Manager as our Apple reseller couldn't get it to work properly(!) when we first deployed iPads. Out of interest, which MDMs are you looking at?

[PR-UK]

We tried Profile Manager to but couldn't get it to work reliably, we also found people saying it wasn't suitable for large deployments and as we'll have 1200 iPads in it that kind of ruled it out.

 

We're mostly looking at Casper, just because of the size of community they have, the education features, and the fast turnaround they've displayed with rolling out new features (iOS Updates and the 9.3 Classroom stuff). We should be getting a demo of it this week at which point we can get some proper testing of it.

 

We've also looked at Zulu Desk which was surprisingly good, with all the educational stuff, but some of it feels a bit work in progress and they don't seem to have any UK presence so you have to buy client licenses off their web store.

 

Non education products like AirWatch and Lightspeed looked ok but they are pretty expensive on per unit pricing! We dismissed Meraki straight away because of their slow development even outside of the legacy version we use.

[scubagirl]

Thanks again PR-UK - woah, I thought I had my hands full with 600!!! Casper, Lightspeed and AirWatch are on my radar, so may see if I can tee up some demos before I make a decision before summer. The thought of recalling them all and setting up with a new MDM makes me want to cry though!

[PR-UK]

Yup, we're not looking forward to telling everyone to backup their data, retrieve, wipe, and update them all then handing them back out in September for the inevitable "You didn't tell me to backup! Where's all my stuff?!"

 

Hoping that with an up to date MDM and managed Apple IDs for the under 13s the whole management process should get a lot easier...

[scubagirl]

Couldn't agree more on both counts!

[Brimstone]

Yup, we're not looking forward to telling everyone to backup their data, retrieve, wipe, and update them all then handing them back out in September for the inevitable "You didn't tell me to backup! Where's all my stuff?!"

 

Hoping that with an up to date MDM and managed Apple IDs for the under 13s the whole management process should get a lot easier...

 

What I would suggest is this to make your life easier when you refresh them with a new MDM...

 

Sign up for DEP, then link this to your new MDM.

If you are already a one 2 one school then ask your students and teachers to backup their data then reset the iPad this wil ask for a wifi password to activate but will now auto enrol into the MDM (once you have configured this)

 

IMPORTANT: If your end users are backing up to iCloud when they reset the iPad it needs to be a different one from the iPad originally backed up. If this is not done when a user resets an iPad using the last iCloud back it will remove the MDM profile from the device upon activation.

[scubagirl]

Thanks Brimstone, that's really helpful. Out of interest, which MDM do you use?

[Brimstone]

Casper from JAMF, really powerful...