Here's my official review:
-Apple configurator has snazzier deployment & supervisor displays.
-It may be more stable, hasn't crashed in 30 hours. Which, if you've used the previous configurator for any large scale deployment, is pretty impressive. Normally, it would crash out every 100 devices or so.
-A space is no longer needed in the auto incremental.
That's all I could find. Anyone else?
They are still missing a couple of Educational and Enterprise features:
1) Profile Sorting: allow us to pick the order the profiles get applied to the devices. Frustratingly, the MDM profile wants to add itself before the WiFi profile causing the MDM to fail. We must first select only the WiFi profile, then apply it. Then select both the WiFi profile and the MDM profile and hope that the WiFi doesn’t timeout when configuring a large number of devices at the same time ( 30 or so ).
2) Add a setting to enable MDM app pushes even though the device has the iTunes store turned off. We turn the iTunes store off after setup and before deployment to students; because we have students literally downloading thousands of games to the devices. They then play the games during class and quickly switch back to work when the teacher walks by. Quite often a teacher will find that killer app. We will purchase 30 copies and would like to push them out the same day. Unfortunately the appstore is turned off via profile. Sure I can temporarily turn the appstore back on remotely via MDM profiles and push the app, but then we get #3 and for the 5 minutes the device’s app store is turned on the students will go into an app downloading frenzy.
3) Add a setting that allows silent pushes without the password required. This becomes a HUGE issue when a school contacts me and asks for me to push Pages to 300 iPads. The MDM does its job perfectly. The iPad pops up a message requiring a password to be entered. Now we sit around with 300 iPads and play ‘smack a mole’ as we tap install like crazy people. Or we could give the students the password and let them install Pages onto the iPad. Then they go home and layer the account and Pages app to their personal iPad, their mom’s, uncles’, next door neighboor’s and girlfriends’ iPads.
This seems like a big problem to me.
Bonus: add a 10 digit code to the iTunes store so that we can just enter the code and forgo selecting my title, typing my firstname, lastname, address, city, selecting my state, typing my zip and phone number over and over again for each device I configure. ~330 last week; I have 100 more iPads sitting behind me and about 300 more coming, not to mention updating all the currently deployed iPads. This code would also allow for more than 7 iTunes accounts to be created per hour; saving me a phone call/email to apple engineers to override a range of device accounts for creation.
