[ipad] How on earth do you deploy ibooks with Impero Edlink?

[Pyroman]

I'm trying to deploy books bought through Apple School Manager to devices that are signed in with Managed Apple IDs and I'm getting the following error...

 

The VPP app store account could not be created

 

I have spoken to Edlink and their response was:

 

We just got an update from our Engineers and it shows that the reason for the message is because Apple Books is associated to the device via the Apple ID and not via book license.

This is by design by Apple as book licenses are not transferable. To get the book installed on the device, you would need to use the Apple ID on the device in order to connect to the app store.

 

What on earth does that mean? I'm signed in with an Apple ID so I'm not sure how I deploy just to an ID and not to the device?

 

Thanks

[Brimstone]

Oh dear Impero looks like they can't deploy books via their MDM....

 

There are essentially 2 types of Apple ID....

 

A Personal I.D. thats used by consumers to purchase content and iBooks and a Managed Apple ID that's owned by the school.

 

Many MDM's such as Jamf, Mosyle etc require you to send out an invite to each user, this invite gets automatically accepted by the end user. This all done within the MDM and is similar to the original VPP invites that schools had to do before device assignment became the norm. Once this is done you can now send the user with a Managed Apple ID content such as iBooks.

Jamf does this by "Automatically register only users with Managed Apple IDs and skip invitation"

 

Not all MDM's have this feature so you may be stuck.....

[RLR]

Brimstone is correct. Books need to be deployed to an Apple ID as publishers didn't like the idea of re-assigning book licenses. They want one license per user so you have to assign a book license to an Apple ID (managed or personal). To do this, you need to invite the users to VPP which they accept and sign up to VPP using an apple ID. You can then assign VPP content to the user but the user must use the apple ID they signed up with to VPP. If they switch apple ID, they will have to be re-invited and get a new license assigned to them. Edlink might not be able to do this.

[Pyroman]

Thank you both! I did think I was missing something, turns out it's Edlink missing something!!!

 

Looks like we're in the market for a new MDM provider then! How easy is it to migrate from Edlink to Jamf? (I assume that Jamf would be the best bet?)