The Solution
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.