Apple Profile Manager and what it means for you:
Apple Profile Manager is a mobile device management system that we are rolling out for the teachers, staff, and students of Wayne County Schools. It will allow for the management of apps and settings on Apple Devices from a single point. School technology staff can leverage this system to install apps and manage settings on a school or classroom level and the county technology staff can likewise use it to enforce county-wide policies.
Benefits to teachers:
Easy, minimal touch, setup. Once this system has been implemented at your location setting up first-time devices, or troubleshooting preexisting devices becomes exceedingly easy. Anyone can follow a few simple steps and set up their own classroom set of Apple devices. There will no longer be a need to track down your sysop, or anyone else, to connect your devices to our wireless network, or to install apps that have already been assigned to your classroom group.
How does this work? Each school now has, or will have, a wireless network named “MobileDeviceSetup” and this network has an easy to remember password. Connecting your Apple device to this network will give it access to our management servers, but not to the internet or other school resources. Upon factory resetting your Wayne County Schools’ device you may connect to this network and your device will be automatically configured. This configuration will include information to automatically connect to the fully open WCS network, as well as any apps, web links, and restrictions applied to your device.
Benefits to Sysops:
Teachers can now setup their own Apple Devices, no need to come find you. You can now push apps, web-links, settings, and other content to entire groups of Apple devices at a time, even your whole school, via the Profile Manager web interface. Apple devices will automatically be configured on first boot with minimal interaction. Since your teachers can now setup their own devices with a couple steps you should never have to setup all the devices yourself.
Restrictions:
Certain restrictions will be placed on all, or most, county owned devices. Examples of these would include disallowing the pairing of devices to apple IDs, disallowing find my iPad, or disallowing other services that allow county owned devices to be locked to individual users. Apps will no longer be able to be downloaded directly from the store, they will need to be acquired through our Volume Purchase account (even free apps) and then pushed to devices. Teacher-only iPads may not be restricted in this way.
Virtually every feature of iOS is able to be restricted, most of these will be left to the discretion of the teacher or principal. For example, a teacher could have her sysop remove the availability of the cameras on the devices in her room, but turn them back on for one lesson that will require it.
Important Notices:
All county-owned apple devices must migrate to this management system by September 30th 2016. Any device that has not been migrated will cease to have internet connectivity.
All schools will need to provide a list of apple devices (serial numbers and their desired names) in their school, broken into the management groups they prefer. It should be relatively easy to convert your inventory list by breaking it up. Failure to provide a structured list will result in your devices being added to Profile Manager without being added to School and/or classroom management groups, making management more difficult.
App pushing requires iOS 9.x or greater.
iPad 1s are not able to be automatically enrolled in Profile Manager, they are also not able to be upgraded to iOS 9.x. They may be enrolled manually, which will be necessary for them to have internet access, but they will still need to be managed in whatever way they were being managed previously.
ALL IPADS MUST BE PURCHASED FROM APPLE OR POMEROY!! DO NOT PURCHASE IPADS FROM ANY OTHER VENDOR SUCH AS WALMART, BEST BUY OR AMAZON. THEY WILL NOT SHOW UP AS BEING OWNED BY WAYNE COUNTY AND AS SUCH WILL NOT WORK BY DEFAULT ON OUR WIRELESS FROM THIS POINT ON.