Device Organization

[JT5]

I am managing over 100 iPad devices for a college. I took over managing the devices after some profiles were mistakenly deleted. The iPads are for different departments.

Currently there is a nursing and science department profile, the name of the school default profile for some reason and an unassigned profile with over “targeted” 1,000 devices.

I realize tags can be an efficient way to categorize the different departments. I’m just looking to organize everything better. So, my questions are:

• Should there be one or more profiles or could tags be used to organize departments?
• If a profile is installed but missing is there a way to get it back or not worry about it and create a new one?

[PaulF]

Hi

So, a few things...

Tags are an amazing way or organising devices, and ensuring that devices can be assigned to roles, such as kiosk, admin, or whatever you want to have.

Once you've identified the roles / departments / whatever classification you wish to give them, you can then use the Tags in both application and payload policies.

Under Targets in apps and settings, you can then assign the tags, and use logic such as "with ANY of the following tags" or "with ALL of the following tags"

One thing I would suggest is to have a setting per payload. Don't be tempted to give a setting multiple payloads: Making a change to one of the payloads will force the re-installation of ALL of the payloads. This is due to Apple allowing multiple payloads within a setting. Most of the time, this isn't an issue. But if you've got an email payload in there, it will re-apply it, forcing the user to authenticate again.

Tags can also be managed from Systems Manager > Tags

I'd have a look at the change log to see what profiles were deleted. This will help you re-create them

I hope that helps for now.

[JT5]

Thanks PaulF!

You mentioned looking into the profiles. 

Is this something I should look into Meraki support with via email or case number?

[BlakeRichardson]

@JT5 Tag are the way to go, I manage over 150 iPads using systems manager spread across multiple departments. Tag's make it very easy to manage the devices. 

You can push devices to refresh their profiles if you have something missing, it could also be that someone has previously scoped a profile to a device and then deleted that profile without removing devices from it's scope and caused the dashboard to get a bit confused. 

[JT5]

Thanks Blake!

I'll give an example, the math and science department have 30 new iPads. They are stored in a locked charging cart for a student to come by and borrow one when needed.

I know this may seem simple but I'm wondering if I should tag each iPad as math and science but (1) since Apple devices seem better suited as a personal device rather than a multi user device who would be considered the owner? And (2) What profile should these 30 iPads be under?

[PaulF]

This is where looking into Apple School Manager comes into play: You wouldn't need to worry about which tags devices have.... It would be more which tags do apps and settings have

And once you start down that road you'll wonder why you never used it!

Students, classes, Teachers, etc, can be uploaded as CSVs into ASM, so if you already have a school information system with this information, this should become trivial 

[PaulF]

Further to the above:

A single policy in Systems Manager will manager every one of your iPads:

Users:

(which can be either students or teachers)

Classes

 Departments

Whilst not strictly necessary, classes can be grouped together into departments: Useful in your case where you may have both maths and science together:

 

When you've all that sorted, you can then specify applications and settings to Classes and users instead of devices:

 

[JT5]

Paul, amazing information.

I'm still learning through this process. 

Since the 100+ iPads are already out "in the wild" would these newer configurations affect them? 

[PhilipDAth]

Another thing I do - when I have devices that are management with radically different configurations (like BYOD versus managed) I just create additional Systems Manager networks to store them in.