Destinova

We recently switched to a Fortimail appliance. The performance is excellent and the price was spot on. We went with the base device - the 100C which can handle 80K messages per hour.

John D. Couch is currently Apple's Vice President of Education - I'll see if I can dig up an email address.

Exactly. That's the "popular workaround" due to the lack of VPP I mentioned earlier. I don't want to go that route, but any other option seems to run the risk of managing 50 iPads becoming a full time job. I'm honestly going to pose this question to the Apple rep speaking here on the 26th. I expect I'll hear a lot of "coming soon" garbage, but it'll be fun to watch him squirm.

You can actually sync an unlimited number of iOS devices to a single iTunes account. The 10 device limit is for iCloud, and the 5 device limit is for authorized computers.

The lack of VPP is frustrating me the more I think about it. Assuming we want to centrally manage these devices rather than just hand them to staff and students and let them to what they will - we really only have two options: 1 - Use the Apple Configuration and VPP to centrally manage and control the iPads and apps. 2 - Without the VPP we'd have to use the popular workaround of syncing all iPads to one iTunes account. An obvious software licensing violation, but the only present alternative. I suppose there's a third option and that's to have an iTunes account for each and every iPad, but that's an administrative nightmare. What's interesting is Apple is having a seminar here on April 26th regarding iPads in Education and the Apple Configurator. I may have to put the speaker on the hot seat.

So still an additional expense since we're entirely a Windows organization. I suppose the good news is we can run OS X Server in VMware...

We've spoken to our local Apple rep and have been told the VPP is not yet available here in Canada. So this at least I know may be a roadblock for us. What MDM server requirements are there? I'm hoping we can use Apple's provided tools rather than paying for a 3rd party MDM server.

Hello, Like many others here we've had several educators express interest in bringing iPads into the schools. We have thus far tried to be relatively hands-off with them but now the idea of a cart or lab of iPads has come up and we need to look at mass sync/configuration. Apple recently released the Apple Configurator (not to be confused with the iPhone configuration tool) for bulk management and sync of iPads. It is OS X only, not available for Windows. Has anyone tried it yet? Cheers.