The Challenge

The Fremantle Football Club’s IT team of three support the technology needs of 150 corporate staff, as well as 80 AFL players across the men’s and women’s codes.

While primarily a Windows shop, the Club requires a significant number of Macs to run a specific piece of software – the AFL Sports Code app, which is used nationally by all registered AFL clubs. Fremantle’s Apple fleet includes 30 iMacs, 60 iPads and 20 iPhones. Under a long-established relationship with a telco, Freo were reliant on their affiliated mobile device management (MDM) to manage them.

Sean Raynor, IT Manager of the Fremantle Football Club, says: “We could manage the Windows infrastructure very easily, very effectively. Which gave us a point of comparison with the limited capabilities of the Apple MDM we were using. Being a small IT team, we are looking for smarter management – less time to deploy and look after our Macs. We needed advanced policy functionality. With better performance from the life of our macOS devices, we’d be improving the experience for us, as well as the rest of the Freo staff and players.

The Solution

The answer for the Club to both automating device management and supporting end-user productivity was Jamf Pro, the MDM platform designed specifically for the macOS.

As Australia’s biggest & most certified Jamf specialists, Compnow – partners of the Fremantle Dockers since 2018 – introduced the platform to Freo, which has transformed the Club’s control over its Apple environment.

Technical engineers from both Compnow and Jamf, working as a customer-focused team, provided the Club with a demonstration version of the platform and Jamf’s functionality options were tested against Fremantle Dockers’ business needs.

“We were very keen to see how Jamf handled the policy component. We proved through the demo how much time we could save with remote and automated management tasks, how we could reduce issues by the triggers we could set using Jamf, and how easy it is to deploy new software. From all the things that used to be so hard, the demo opened our eyes to what was possible,” Sean says.

Compnow was a prime resource for the Club with its “deep understanding of the Jamf platform and great relationship with Jamf’s sales and technical people – they do very slick work between them,” he says.

The Club moved to a full production environment licence of Jamf Pro, with cloud hosting, in October 2021.

“Crucial to our self-sufficiency, Compnow recommended Jamf 200 training be included in our licence package. From that, we had the skills to capably manage the Jamf tools and our own environment from Day 1.

“The set up was very smooth. Compnow & Jamf walked us through and it just worked. The support we had at the beginning gave us everything we needed. We haven’t needed to speak to them again,” he says.

The Benefits

In weighing licence costs against ROI, Sean says: “Jamf is premium compared to the competing alternative we had been using. But Jamf’s extra features are saving more time and money than the bare licence costs. Jamf does what it’s designed to do, without problem. It’s an important tool that does so much. The returns are worth every dollar.

“To introduce a new laptop, or replace one that was lost, used to take a day. That involved HR, the impact of staff downtime, our time – so much manual input. Now, they go to lunch and there’s a new laptop sitting ready for them when they get back. That’s a priceless improvement.”

Sean says Apple devices arrive at Freo, “blank out of the box, but already loaded into Jamf. All we do is to tell Jamf who it’s going to, e.g. a coach or staff member, and Jamf installs the role appropriate software. There’s no hassle. We even had the situation of a new guy starting with us who figured out how to use Jamf and had loaded new software onto 30 devices before I’d had a chance to tell him what to do.”

The Fremantle Dockers identified Jamf’s intuitive user interface as a key differentiator: “We fast tracked our overall understanding of the product through the introductory training, and after that, we could just go into the tool kit and get a result. With the old systems we used, the upskilling required to do anything new was very high. And we couldn’t get consistency. We’d deploy three laptops and find different error messages in each,” Sean says.

Because Jamf is designed for the macOS, “it works irrespective of which device you’re managing. We just enrolled our first iPhones. I thought we’d have to go through different processes or settings, but it was exactly the same as the iPad we’d completed in the job before. Because Jamf knows what it’s dealing with and what it’s doing, the phones were a seamless addition to our platform,” Sean says.

Using Jamf Connect has also empowered Freo to better manage the network shares and server files being deployed to users. “The single log in has been very effective. From a single password, our users can access both their device and their applications – everyone really likes the simplicity of this move. And we’re able to more efficiently use our fleet as staff or players can share devices using their own access,” he says.

Jamf Connect pushes to each device the current Fremantle Dockers’ wallpaper “with our branding, logo, professional shots of our building, teams etc. When you turn on a device, you see this and feel part of everything. It’s great for morale,” Sean says.