[ipad] JAMF vs Lightspeed

[Bev]

I currently use Lightspeed to manage 400 iPads, I am not a fan of it and am keen to move to an alternative MDM. I have some experience of Mosyle and Meraki but I haven't used them for 1-1 iPads / Apple Classroom.

 

The company who supply our iPads initally recommended Lightspeed but have now moved to JAMF, which I am completely unfamiliar with.

Has anyone got any experience of both Lightspeed and JAMF? And can offer any comparisions?

 

My main issues with Lightspeed:

 

I find it very slow.

Not at all intuitive to use

No app on the iPad, so you can't refresh from the iPad, or reinstall missing apps from the iPad.

You can only install apps by group, so if a single person needs a single app, you end up having to create another group just for that one app.

[Brimstone]

Jamf is by far a much superior product against Lightspeed as there are some features that Lightspeed can not "yet" support..

 

Managed App updates, by managing apps in JAMF whenever an app update arrives you don't need to touch any iPads, there are automatically pushed out. Lightspeed still can not do this efficiently.

 

Jamf can linked to Azure AD or local AD (Lightspeed Mobile Manager can not do this alone) so for a 1:1 deployment it's a breeze to give students a boxed iPad for them to activate, when they authenticate using AD it gets attached to that user.

 

If you want a complete ad hoc method of installing apps, Jamf has a self service app. When a user needs the odd app just put this into self service, when they need the app they just install themselves no need for you to do anything, other than put these into the self service area in the Jamf interface.

 

Create Apple Classroom on an ad hoc basis. If you have students in a 1:1 deployment and you need to quickly create classes for the teacher to use Apple Classroom for different students you can do this in Jamf. No need to create them from Apple School Manager.

 

Very quick support from Jamf for newest Apple features (They had Apple Classroom support the day Apple announced it was available)

 

I've got many MAT's and schools across the UK using Jamf...

[Bev]

Thank you,

I'm going to arrange a trial and see how it goes.

 

I wish there was an easier way to move 400 iPads to a new MDM but it seems like it's requires a wipe of every iPad.

[Brimstone]

Yes this will require a wipe of every iPad but.....

 

This might be a chance to "re-establish" and ask those questions about "why iPad?" As you are 1:1 get the students activating them, my record for a new deployment day with a large primary was 400 x iPads, I touched about 10 of them during the day.

 

One other thing to bear in mind, if you have restricted "erase all content and settings" on each iPad using Lightspeed be sure to remove this before you start removal from LS and wiping them and also students have signed out of their Managed Apple ID. I assume all of them are in DEP?

[Bev]

What do you mean?

 

This might be a chance to "re-establish" and ask those questions about "why iPad?"

 

 

They aren't all in DEP as we have a mixture of leased iPads which are in DEP and BYOD iPads which are supervised and manually added to Lightspeed. It's not too bad as 90 students will be leaving school soon, and we will have 90 new starters who can start afresh with the new MDM. Of the remaining 3 year groups, about 30% are BYOD, so probably around 100 to do manually.

 

The issue with wiping them, is that I don't believe you can do a backup and restore if you are changing MDM and as the are personal iPads (paid for by parents), they have personal apps and information on them.

[Brimstone]

The backup and restore is done via iCloud and a personal Apple ID..? The all the apps and content purchased will arrive back when you restore.

 

The rules around restoring iPads that are Supervised are as follows..

 

 

• If you configure a device to be supervised and enrolled in MDM using the Device Enrollment Program, then restore a backup made when the same device was unsupervised, the device will be unsupervised.
  
• If you restore a backup made when the same device was supervised by Apple Configurator and enrolled in MDM, the device will remain supervised and enrolled, but the MDM profile will be removable, because Apple Configurator cannot lock MDM enrollment.
  
• If you restore the backup to a different device that is configured for supervision and MDM enrollment via the Device Enrollment Program, the device will remain supervised and MDM enrollment will not be removable."