I had heard rumors about a feature in iOS 7 that would allow for "pulling back" applications. In essence, I can assign an app to an iPad when a student gets enrolled in a class and then I can pull the app back when they move on and no longer need the app. This would greatly ease our app management pains. As it stands now, we have to be extremely careful about application deployment. It's very tedious to make sure the correct iTunes account is logged into an iPad when we use a VPP redemption code. If we're not careful, we can "give away" our redemption codes since they follow the iTunes account and not the device. But that's all going to change now.
Apple now has added a "managed distribution" mechanism to iOS to allow the apps to be assigned to devices, and most importantly, unassigned from devices. How did this not make major headlines when it was unveiled? This is a major problem that we have faced with iOS devices and on the surface it looks to be the feature that we've always wanted. I haven't actually had a chance to play with it yet, and the only thing I've read about it comes from this this Apple support page. But so far, wow! It's about time.
I've just done a bit more searching about this feature and it looks like there are a couple of sites with a few more notes about it. It looks like enterprise iOS picked it up first with this article.
One downside that I do see is that it doesn't work for books. But that's OK. I'll happily take what I can get*.
*This isn't happily because Apple is great and wonderful and I'll love anything that comes from them. It's happily because this problem has been a real pain and with the number of iPads showing up increasing every day we'll take anything to help make management easier.
Even with this new model, do you think that managing a fleet of iPads still takes more man-hours that managing a fleet of Chromebooks?
ReplyDeleteI have managed iPads under the old model with the downloaded spreadsheet and it was very time consuming.
I was just excited to see them finally add this feature. As I haven't used it yet, I cannot say with certainty which is faster. But I do know that managing 1000 Chromebooks takes only a few minutes a week.
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