RLR

I'm not sure what our initial cost was but our renewal quote this year was £4.60 per iPad and £9 per MAC for casper.

Most of the big MDM's do the same thing as apple have limited api's to allow them to do stuff. You probably want to look at more MDM's and see what you may need for the future. For example, if you want to start managing iMacs you may want to go for Casper (now called Jamf Pro). They also make sure they have all new features available for zero day release. Other things to look for are what support is like for each copany.

I think it will depend on the size of the school. We have a team of 7 to support our 6 Schools which are spread across the city.

We allow students to unlock the device but we also use our MDM to stop students changing the passcode.

com.apple.home is working for me on Casper.

We usually go out to multiple company's for quotes. We find Jigsaw24 to always be the cheapest. Other companies we have bought from are AMC computer supplies. You want to make sure which ever company you use that they are familiar with DEP.

Inventry works by connecting to your MIS. The receptionist will need to use the Inventry software to push the information to the MIS every so often. It also has a really good fire evacuation procedure where the receptionist can click a button and get a list of all students currently signed in. Also, they have a fire evac app for iPad so you can take the fire registers on your iPad.

We just had a new system installed over the Summer called Inventry (yes spelt inventry). A screen is put in at reception which students can use to swipe their cards if their late. It also handles new visitors, recurring visitors, takes photos, prints ID labels. Very handy for knowing who is DBS checked and who is not.

With Casper there is a Config profile payoload called Home Screen layout. If this is configured it doesn't allow you to move apps about.

Did the same thing. It seems Casper uses the Course ID as the class display name so we have lots of Classes called the same thing in Casper.

Managed to get apple school manager working and we've uploaded our csv files. Staff can see their classes and the students are all correct. The only issue we have is the Class names in the Apple Classrooms app are not correct. The names being displayed are completely different to what is showing in the ASM portal and Casper. Currently got a support call open with Casper to see what it might be. Unless anyone else has some ideas?

The best way I've found to get photos off an iPad is to use a MAC along with iPhoto. Plug iPad into MAC > Open iPhoto > Import the pictures you want to the MAC.

We've not had any reports about wifi issues with our iPads. We've got around 600 on our main site and another 400 spread across a few others sites which all come back to one place.

I'm not sure with Meraki as we use Casper suite. I know to install apps automatically you need to make sure the ipads are supervised. Apple school manager only integrates with 2 MISs in America at the moment. Sims isn't available yet and when I've asked them about it they don't even seem interested. You'll have to use CSV's and upload via sftp.

I'm currently trying to upload to the SFTP at the moment. I've managed to connect to the SFTP and uploaded my files to the dropbox folder but nothing seems to be happening in the ASM browser interface. Just says waiting for SFTP upload when I've already done it! Managed to successfully do it a couple weeks ago.

The accounts are deleted 30 days after they've been made inactive. I still think they need to make it possible for us to delete them though. I believe you can re-upload a csv file to change the apple ID/details of bulk users. The person_ID field is used to identify the user and if you make any changes on the CSV file, it will change it to the user mapped to the person_ID. Also, if you only want to use ASM to setup managed apple ID's, you can use # to populate any "required" fields.

We have it as part of our printing contract. The printing company supply us with pre-paid postage labels and we leave them at our reception where we have a daily pickup of any post.

We use google to sign-in and I think the teachers have to do it once a day unless they force close the app. Then they have to do it again.

Yea, we've got this in our MDM but it only allows us to stop modification of Bluetooth so if it's off when we enable this profile, it will stay off and they can't edit it. Apple need to allow it so we can make it always on. One issue we're seeing is an iPad will get stuck on "Installing Configuration for ". The iPad doesn't get past this screen and just hangs. The work around I've found is to restart the iPad by holding the home and power button. Quickly rush through the setup pages and skip wifi connection. When the Config profile page re-appears, press the home button and the iPad will load.

We have an issue where only some students are syncing from our mis to impact. Had call open about 2 weeks and only spoke to one person. When I ring them they say their busy and will ring us when they get to it. Apparently they've had 2k calls since September and only have 8 engineers. Very frustrating as this seems to happen each year.

Another question. When I was testing this a few months ago I could upload a CSV file of just students to create their accounts. Now, it makes me upload all files such as rosters, staff, classes etc. Is there a way to just do one part of this?

Yep, looks like it was our firewall too. Thanks for the info!

What app are you using for the SFTP upload? I'm not having much luck and I'm not sure if it is a connection issue at apples end or me not using the app correctly!

Ah okay, I'm getting a connection error on this too!

Currently getting the same message on our ASM. Can't create any new users at the moment and I can't seem to find the CSV upload area anymore? I just submitted a ticket here: https://www.apple.com/support/itunes/vpp-edu/