Apple School Manager and Casper MDM

[Bankesy]

Hello

 

I'm just after any information anybody may have regarding ASM and MDM systems.

 

We use Casper to manage our iPads here and are in the early stages of investigating the use of Apple School Manager.

 

Really we are trying to understand the connection\link (if any) between Casper and ASM.

 

We have read that Apple School Manager won't work without being configured on a MDM server such as Casper and believe we have put the right settings in place for this but can't tell if all the required data should be uploaded to ASM directly or Casper.

 

There are a lot of pointers towards the whole thing only being effective in a Shared iPad environment but we have a 1:1 deployment.

 

Obviously with Apple School Manager still being so new we wonder if it's best to just wait until our MIS is supported rather than mess about with all the CSVs that the ASM Setup Assistant provides.

 

Thank you

[RLR]

Hello,

 

I've been looking at this the last few days. We use Casper also. I found that you need to create users in ASM and import them into Casper. The import can either create new users or link to existing users. I guess as you already have a 1:1 deployment like us you'll have the users setup via LDAP. This means you can link the users you create in ASM to the users in Casper.

 

You need add your ASM to casper by going to Casper's Settings > Mobile Device Management > Apple Education Support. Make sure apple education support is turned on. You can then click the Apple School Manager tab and add your instance of ASM by linking it with the DEP Instance you have on casper. At the bottom will also be "Matching Criteria for Importing Users". I struggled to get this to work at first but found out that the easiest way to get this to work is to use JSS Username is equal to Source System Identifier. The source system identifier is the Person_ID in ASM. Our students use their school number as their username so I've set all our students Perseon_ID as their school number.

 

Once you've found what works best for you and ran a sync. You have to import the users. You can import users by going to the Users tab. Do a blank search and a new option will appear called "Import". This is where you can import your users from ASM to Casper by following the wizard. It will tell you whether it will create new users or link to existing ones.

 

I've not got round to testing classes yet but I think now that we have some users the classes can't be too difficult to figure out.

 

 

There is some good information in these threads:

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=20749

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=20865

[Bankesy]

Good evening, I've been meaning to return to this post for a while but got carried away with testing so the findings below came prior to reading your response but we have found very similar results to what you describe.

 

It's interesting you mention LDAP as we are not using it in this way, Casper knows nothing of our student users. We only have it setup currently in that all of the mobile device names are named after the student who has the iPad and we did this manually.

 

We got through the same enabling of ASM in Casper exactly as you did and set the matching criteria as you have based on a video we watched which implied this was correct. We were unaware that the source system identifier is the Person_ID so thanks for pointing that out.

 

We just made up some data to fill out the CSVs at first just to see if we could get a successful import into ASM (1 teacher, 1 class, 1 student). Following this we found the same information you have provided on importing the users and found the classes import follows a similar procedure.

 

It was at this point that we started looking into how to get the Classroom app working, this apparently requires the EDU profile to be installed from Casper onto the teacher and student iPads but our reading told us that this requires each device to be specifically assigned to a user (this is the teacher or student account that Casper sees imported from ASM). So we got this working in the case of our 1 teacher, 1 student test and sure enough the Classroom app on the teacher iPad could see and control the student ipad.

 

Our issue with this is having to go through all 800 or so of our devices and assigning them to the individual teacher of student, I have enquired with JAMF about the automation of this bit but it doesn't seem possible yet. Do you think if we switched to using LDAP and imported the users linked to existing users this might overcome the problem?

 

On a side note we use iSAMS as an MIS and I did enquire with them about their plans to become compliant with ASM to which they only said they have enquired with Apple.

 

Look forward to any response you might have.