Jamf best practice

I think the most important thing is plan out your environment. Don’t just think about what it looks like today, think about how big and what the future has in store for your district. If you don’t plan for expansion it will cause you a headache later.

Be sure to know your resources!

support@jamf.com and success@jamf.com will give you access to support and Jamf Customer Success Teams.

• Jamf School Administrators Guide – No resource list is complete without this.

Best,

Dominique

Jamf Pro or Jamf School?

I’ve always found that lots of preparation and testing really helps! Have some spare iPads and try setting them up in the MDM just the way you want them, fixing and refining your Jamf Pro configuration as you go.

This might be helpful? https://education.apple.com/en/story/250011271

Hi Brian-

Planning your environment over a number of years is a great method. Our district had JAMF Pro years ago, found it to be expensive and not really being used efficiently. Switched to FileWave, and then JAMF School. We are very happy with JAMF School, especially with our iPads, but finding that there are about 10-15% items that would be easier to do on our MacBooks with JAMF Pro. Now considering a mixed JAMF environment for the next set of devices/licenses.

Brian,

One of the best tips I could share is to jot down some of the common scenarios / outcomes you'd like to use jamf for, then see how you can design the structure from there. For us we are a three-school K-8 with grade-level buildings. That means at times we may have requests come in for things like:

• Make an app available on all 1st grade iPads
• Make an app available for all students in a specific building
• Send a webclip to all staff
• Make sure certain grade-levels have a printer installed
• Let all students get the Everyone Can Create guides

That then goes to structure a bit. If student usernames have something in them that can identify a grade-level (better year, something that indicates a graduation year), you can create smart groups based on that, then use logic to create bigger buckets. (All students in building A are Grades K,1,2, so we can create a group for K, a group for 1, a group for 2, then a larger group for all students in building A where the members are grade K, grade 1, grade 2)

Scoping apps to grades is wonderful ability, but you will want to try and make those groups be dynamic if possible. To do this, we have students actually only in one group; the group of the year they graduate. That way apps and settings are still scoped to a grade level (example 8th grade), but the 8th grade group is actually members of the "Class 2024" group. This allows us to never need to change how apps are scoped (since those are to grade-levels) but instead just update who is an 8th grader. Next year, we will change the 8th Grade group to be members of "Class 2025".

It's a lot of planning work, but once it is in place, the structure doesn't need to change too much and you only need to really update a few locations each year.

Another tip I would suggest is to try and scope items to users when possible instead of devices. If a student or teacher device breaks and we scope apps to a device the replacement device won't always get the correct settings.

Hope that helps out a bit! If you'd like to pick my brain more, feel free to reach out!