Multiple site iPad management - advice and ideas

[AlexM]

Hi,

 

I've been tasked with setting up iPad management including apps for iPads across 80 primary schools. We already have a basic Meraki management solution in place which basically just deploys the Meraki agent plus certificates to allow connection to our WiFi across the schools.

 

What I want to achieve is to have each school's iPads moved into their own container and then they have there own VPP log-in so they can buy and deploy apps themselves. I do also need them to have some sort of centralised storage for photos, videos etc. Previously some schools have done this and used a Mini Mac onsite for the storage side but is there an easier neater way to do this centrally for all schools without the risk of one school accessing another school's files?

 

The network/ Wifi connection across all our sites is very good and each school sits on our network with traffic to the outside world all converging at a central point before being proxied out - so no school is directly connected to the internet using a router on-site. Everything is Cisco managed.

 

Any help or advice gratefully received.

[Brimstone]

If you are looking at a MDM and file management across multiple sites I would seriously consider these..bear in mind MDM's do not generally give you cloud file storage as well

 

For MDM...

 

https://www.jamf.com

 

For file storage using each schools Windows Server...

 

https://foldr.io

[mikeyd101]

We use jamf here for our macs and I can highly recommend it. We did also manage ipads but since given that up due to cost vs Management (Teacher ipads). We are planning to go back to ipad management as we have just deployed 1 class of ipads with more class sets in the future.

 

Internet access to files is something that I have just starting looking at after moving our JAMF Server from apple to Linux.

 

There are some good videos from JNUC this year on youtube that are worth watching to get a better handle on JAMF.