Help - IT and Mac device setup

[bag99001]

Hi All - Same old story I'm sure you've heard a million times - work in a school. They are getting rid of Macs because they "can't set them up remotely" or "manage them remotely" - any advice on the realities of this? I'm looking for as specific as possible - I'm pretty technical but of course have never managed a thousand machine school. I'm aware of plenty of schools (I've worked at them) that support Macs I know they've used JAMF. I think they are not interested in the cost of that. Does Windows really do this better or is it just a knowledge issue on IT's behalf? I am guessing it's a losing battle, but would like to be as informed as possible.

By the way, they are "getting rid" of an investment of hundreds of iMacs, Mac minis, and MacBooks and Apple TVs for conference rooms.

Thanks,

Brett

 

[dsampley]

Jamf Pro is one of several solutions for MDM. In my experience, MDM is an area where Apple products outshine Windows.

 

[bag99001]

Jamf Pro is one of several solutions for MDM. In my experience, MDM is an area where Apple products outshine Windows.

I am aware of Jamf but there is a fee per user. Is there a built in option though that doesn’t require a 3rd party for deployment?

 

[synicalx1]

IMO the story around managing Mac's without paying through the nose for an MDM like Jamf isn't really that great. If you have an MDM then Macs are great and easy to manage but you're then going to be paying $5-8 per device per month which can really add up. With Windows devices there's a fairly mature ecosystem of imaging, patching, and management software that can be had for free or for low cost - MDT/WSUS being a very prominent example of this.

There is a thread I referenced a while back on Spiceworks when I was looking for something similar to manage our Mac fleet at work, honestly a lot of the options suggested were pretty bad. We ended up going for Jamf + InTune (which we were already paying for) and we get all our devices pre-enrolled directly from Apple.

Another option, if the school's IT department has a lot of time - they could use Ansible to manage Macs. IIRC it just needs Python + some credentials to run so it should work out of the box on most new Macs once a user account is setup on the device.