Tag: Configurator

Giving up on Profile Manager (Again)

Today I was busy setting up some new iPad minis for school.  Apple Configurator is getting increasingly reliable and stable, so didn’t hit too many issues with that.  However, I then hit a problem that I couldn’t get the devices to enrol on Profile Manager.

Now, I’ve spent several years trying my best to get Profile Manager to work.  On Lion, it was basically broken. By Mavericks, it had improved quite a lot.  But it was never fully reliable, with odd quirks coming up every now and again.  There were some cool features, such as the use of variables when setting up things such as email accounts.  But the downside to this was that when the Mac server decided to lose the link to our Active Directory, this resulted in all of the teachers’ email settings being removed from their iPads. Not fun.

Now, I have used Meraki before, which has a free MDM solution.  It doesn’t do everything and can be a bit confusing to use, but it is certainly reliable.  And free.  So today I decided that I would use Profile Manager to actually build all of my profiles (which it is really good at, e.g. email settings, restrictions etc.) and then use Meraki to deploy them.

And so far, this seems to be working fine!  The only downside is that I have to remove every device from Profile Manager and enrol them onto Meraki instead, but I’m having to do a bit a refresh anyway, so it shouldn’t be too much work as well.

Automatic Updates for VPP Apps on Supervised Devices

I finally got it to work – yay!

I stumbled across the solution whilst updating a set of iPad minis to the new iOS7 iLife and iWork, as one of the iPads already had the latest versions of the apps.  How did that happen?

It seems that perhaps the elusive ‘Updates’ slider under ‘Automatic Downloads’ on ‘iTunes & App Store’ in Settings does work after all.  What I think happens is that the updates are set to pending, and then when the iPad tries to install them it will ask for the password for the account you use with VPP on Configurator.  However, this isn’t much use when setting up multiple iPads as the conditions for triggering a pending App update aren’t quite clear.

Here’s what I did instead:

1. Make sure that the App Store is enabled on the iPad

2. In settings, sign into the App Store using a different Apple ID than the one used for Configurator.  I have one setup for each set of iPads so I used that.  Make sure ‘Updates’ is turned on.

3. In the App Store, tap on ‘Updates’ and then tap on ‘Update All’ in the top left of the screen.  It will ask for the password for the iPad’s App Store AppleID.  But then in a few seconds, it will ask for the password for the Configurator AppleID.  Enter this.

4. Done!  You are now in Automatic Updates heaven.