A fully scoped, deployed and maintained device management program at Ascham is supporting the School’s technology platform goal: to give every student the opportunity to thrive.
Ascham is an independent, non-denominational, day and boarding school for girls from Prep to Year 12, in Edgecliff, Sydney. It is one of Australia’s highest ranking independent schools, with its quality education built on a strong and widely respected academic program.
Overcoming the inherent issues, risks and costs of the largely manual control over the School’s App distribution and operating system management.
With CompNow support, cost effective Jamf Pro enterprise mobility management delivers unified endpoint management for Apple devices.
Underpinning each student’s learning experience at the school, was an ever changing technology environment. Ascham was outgrowing the largely manual methods of controlling its iPad fleet’s operating system management and App distribution.
There were groupings of iPads across the campus, each of which required individual iTunes accounts and password management. The school also had issues procuring Apps, and the outsourced administration was becoming very costly.
Ascham’s reputational leadership is reinforced through strong governance and sound planning. In undertaking the Mac and iOS Mobile Device Management move, Dane Marcus, Ascham’s Network Manager, went to the market seeking a best practice solution that addressed the specific business and technical requirements of an educational setting.
“CompNow is highly regarded in the education sector, and here at Ascham,” Dane says.
The CompNow team scoped the project, assessed where and how the iPads were being used, and qualified what Ascham wanted to gain. Jamf Pro proved to fulfil the needs analysis and part of the initial work was to demonstrate its capabilities.
The engineering of the new environment included Jamf Software Server cloud hosting. CompNow designed and carried out the onsite Jamf training for Dane and the School’s help desk technicians.
Of concern was how best to leverage Ascham’s existing hardware infrastructure to deploy the new management regime and capture the greatest value for money. The cloud hosted Jamf Pro uses Ascham’s server for imaging services and connection points. This on-premise distribution point delivers applications over the internal network so there is no need to download Apps from the internet prior to being pushed to selected devices.
Dane confirmed the entire environment was rolled out within 3 weeks of project commencement.
Ascham commissions CompNow’s professional services to undertake the annual maintenance of the Jamf operating environment and ensure the consistent, accurate upgrading of its increasing numbers of iOS devices.
Ascham currently has 120 Apple desktops (and increasing in coming years) used by the Art and Music departments in the senior school. The fleet of nearly 600 iPads is targeted at Prep through to Year 4 students.
There were immediate results from Jamf’s single pane of glass deployment and inventory management across the organisation. “It’s been a huge success. The process has automated what was a manual process for updating settings, Apps and profiles. Everything is so fast. It’s all managed from one central location, and gives us full visibility of the fleet,” Dane says.
“The Jamf project has resulted in a huge amount of time saved which means that the IT Department is now performing more value adding rather than repetitive tasks. We’re also saving on app licensing costs as we know exactly what we have.”
Having ticked all these boxes, Ascham decided to add Jamf Pro to its Mac desktop rollout. “This second deployment also went extremely smoothly,” he says.
“CompNow has been incredibly professional throughout all our engagements with them. They always follow up on what they’ve promised. I have only praise for CompNow’s technicians and account management. There’s a lot of product and Apple operational knowledge throughout their operation. We couldn’t do it without them,” Dane says.
