Intune - iOS App Deployment - A better way?

[Planehazza]

Deploying apps is tedious. We have 8 schools using ~600 ipads, and each school requests different apps, blah blah.

 

I have the iPads in nest groups, ie 

 

Trust All iPads > School All iPads > School Student iPads > School KS1 iPads 

Trust All iPads > School All iPads > School Student iPads > School KS2 iPads 

etc##

 

This way I can block Safari etc. and trust level, or ban settings at staff/student levels once. I've got quite nice targeting options.

 

Deploying an app to KS1 iPads at school 1, then KS2 iPads and schools 2 and 3 etc, is going to take a lot of time especially if we have nearly 100 apps etc.

 

Do you guys take a similar approach to SCCM? Have a group for each app then just add device groups into app groups? I'm just thinking out loud that this will be fast for subsequent deployments?

Edited July 23 by Planehazza

[sideone]

We use dynamic groups for the devices, based on use (e.g. Staff Devices, Year 1, Year 2 etc). Apps are assigned to these groups so Staff Devices get (for example) ClassDojo, iMovie, and OneDrive. 

 

The group memberships are set by device name template. So we add a device to Intune, rename it according to the template (e.g. SchoolName-ipad-Staff-01) and the device gets added to the group automatically, which then picks up policies and apps.

[Planehazza]

I thought about those but the issue I'm having (compounded by the fact we're reluctantly enforcing shared iPad mode KS1 through KS4 and staff) is I'm struggling to find a way to name them in bulk quickly and easily. I'm hacving to go through 600 iPads to wipe and enrol to Intune and am doing it as methodically as I can to leverage enrolment policy naming templates, but it's hit and miss and something has gone and renamed previously enrolled devices too 🤦

[steveg]

We use dynamic groups based on enrolment tokens, not sure this is the right way to do it or how well it scales, but our 8 different sets of iPads have different enrolment tokens, then I just assign the devices in bulk in apple school manager and they all end up in the right dynamic groups once enrolled, mostly we just name them Setname-serialnumber which can be done automatically on enrollment.