Many educational institutions are starting to support iPads for student or faculty use in classroom instruction. Since there are a growing number of classes now requiring iPads, this requires an efficient way to manage varying groups of iPads without having to physically touch each one or to have every student drop by to have settings (a profile) installed. You have the option to e-mail a profile or have a student download one from the web but that makes the support process more complex and requires additional staff resources. At the University of Notre Dame this hands-off approach also prevented our Academic Tech support team from updating configurations once installed.
We recently started having students log into Apple’s new Profile Manager server to allow them to self-install the individual Profile for their class. We also are now collaborating with the campus bookstore to distribute iPads to students at the start of each semester which means we no longer have to manually open up each iPad to pre-configure or register them on the network before distributing them to students or faculty.
A small pilot class of 35 iPads can be easily maintained using the iPhone Configuration Utility. But to configure them, we had to connect each iPad to an Apple workstation, configured the iPad and then we either went to the class or had the class come to us for final configuration. This wasted a class period so we wanted something easier that could also be scalable as our requirements to support iPads grows over time. We chose to skip using Apple Configurator and went directly to the Profile Manager for iOS. We recently used the Profile Manager to configure 135 new iPads across 3 different academic classes and to allow the iPads to also use AirPlay (wireless iPad video projection) in 2 different classrooms for teacher and student interaction.
In this presentation, we will discuss how to minimize physical handling of iPads and how to set Profile configuration payloads, which include General, Passcode, Airplay network, VPN and Exchange setups. We will outline the advantages of using Profile Manager to update configurations and remove old or outdated profiles. How to push purchased, free and enterprise applications to iPads will be discussed and lessons learned from a number of un-documented issues that we encountered with setting privileges, available memory, and Profile removal issues.
