What is Apple School Manager?

Apple School Manager is a web-based service for school IT administrators to manage student devices from a single console. With this service, you can quickly create accounts for your students and staffs to share essential learning content without risking the privacy terms of the school organization. Apart from sharing content, this service lets you configure over-the-air device enrollment on your Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution as well as buy and distribute apps and books. Deployment of iOS, macOS and tvOS devices became much more concise and sorted with the Apple School Manager. Devices running iOS 7 or later, macOS 10.9 or later and tvOS 10.2 or later are eligible for assignment to the MDM solution through Apple School Manager.

If you already own an account in Apple Deployment Program, things become much easier to handle. All you need to do is an upgrade from Apple Deployment Program to Apple School Manager. Upgrading includes moving all MDM servers, device orders and assignments, as well as management-level accounts. Post upgrading, the account names on your Apple Deployment Program are entirely changed in Apple School Manager as follows:

1. Program Agent is referred to as Administrator.
2. Administrators become managers.
   • The accounts hosted to buy licenses of apps and books from the Volume Purchase Program (VPP) are called Content Managers.
   • The accounts managing MDM servers are called Device Managers.

Privacy is a major concern which Apple holds at the top. Student-specific and school-related information are not put to risk. This concern is met with Managed Apple IDs. The school can control student information and can choose to enable or disable apps and services.

Signing in to a personal or shared device is made possible via Managed Apple IDs. They also provide access to Apple services. Managed Apple IDs will be created automatically when you connect Apple School Manager with your school’s data and in turn, the students receive access to Apple’s services like iCloud, iTunes and Shared iPad. If an individual chooses to deny access to the Apple services, the iPads can be deployed without an Apple ID. In such a scenario, no sign-in is required, turn on the device and get to work. You can create Managed Apple IDs any time based on your requirement and distribute them at a later point of time. Setting up Managed Apple IDs provides access to 200GB of iCloud storage encompassing all documents, images, videos and other types of files.

Integrating Apple School Manager with a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution helps to automate device setup for one-to-one as well as shared iPad environments. This enables the school authorities to wirelessly configure settings and restrictions according to the school’s requirements and then easily assign the devices to the concerned group or individual.

Assigning the devices to your MDM server for easy enrollment and configuration is a breeze with Apple School Manager. With an MDM solution like Hexnode, device management becomes simpler and swifter. Reconfiguring Home screen layouts, scheduling software updates and using MDM Lost Mode to find misplaced devices are some of the highlights of an MDM-integrated Apple School Manager account. Apple School Manager provides a more flexible license and token management service, and with MDM, contents can be directly sent to iPads and Macs. With Apple School Manager, new apps can be easily searched and handled.