Apple School Manager

Yes, the portal is pretty low-risk for us so I said "what the hey" and made the jump.

Working with our SE on a few things. I'm unable to perform a password reset or use any of the resources at appleid.apple.com. The VPP Fulfillment Portal is also down for us, following the migration. So make sure you get those requests in before taking the plunge.

Thanks for the response @dferrara !

Did you have the VPP accounts all managed under a single organization (in deploy.apple.com) before making the jump?

Yes, it took about 5 minutes when the system came online for us. This was way after making sure all DEP and VPP accounts were under the same master account, AppleCare helps you with this.

All in all, to get there is easy. What happens afterward is the hard part.

If you are using an SIS that is ready for ASM and the portal works, then you are golden. Otherwise, it's CSV hell. Make sure you read the ASM help materials before proceeding. Go through the CSV templates, understand them and do a test run with a few users, best to play before the real "game" starts.

Current issue is that ASM goes offline from time to time. URL times out repeatedly, then stable, etc. YMMV.

Not happy with the fact that students are imported with their grade info rather than expected graduation year. I sent in a note to Apple on that one.

As I proceed, will update with pertinent info. So far, so good.

No problem @cpdecker. Yeah we had everything under one umbrella Apple ID (created exclusively for VPP and DEP).

@cpdecker If you dont already have all your accounts under the same deploy.apple.com login, check out this Apple Support article on how to merge them

I saw this thread and wanted to get some prospective form you guys. Why are you doing this? What are the benefits of spending the time to get Casper and School Manager both running? Do they do complementary things that make managing the whole ball of wax easier? I would be happy to read about it if anyone can point me to a white paper or tech article. Thanks.

Make sure that your push certificates are not expiring before upgrading to ASM. The apple ID we used to log into the portal no longer works after the upgrade. Our Apple contact says it's a known issue and will be escalated. Luckily our certificates were just renewed right before the upgrade.

@kyoung ,

Probably the biggest benefit is actual managed AppleID's--we will be able to create AppleID's en masse for students and staff, have the ability to reset their passwords ourselves, and they won't have to be tied to an actual e-mail address. This sounds absolutely wonderful, but we will have to go through the pain of getting our SIM to interface with it and reassigning AppleID's to thousands of users.

But also, my understanding is that Apple has retired their U13 AppleID program as of the end of the month, removing our ability to create AppleID's for those students without using Apple School Manager. So, it really feels like the kind of thing they want you to move to.

I hadn't really thought about it, but I guess they are leaving the old deploy.apple.com in place for enterprises that aren't school systems?

talk to you Apple SE they are having webinars for the migrations in the Apple school Manager. It was helpful watching but you might be on the phone a while to resolve issues with Legacy VPP accounts that were not moved in to DEP.

Whatever account you use to migrate to Apple School manager will become a managed ID and currently cannot be used to login to the push certificate renewal site at Apple (or the deploy site but you can still get to VPP through the iTunes store address). This may not be a problem immediately. but you'll want to watch to make sure it gets resolved or you'll have to re-enroll your devices on a new certificate.

Looks to me like after upgrading that my devices ignore "Require Authentication" in our pre-stage enrollments. Wasn't expecting that.

This isn't the case. I screwed up in configurator.

I've not enable it in the JSS as of yet and likely won't for some time. I understand from JAMF that when classes, students are updated it has to regenerate the entire EDU profile and is causing issues with JSS performance. Now this was just prior to the 9.92 maintenance release that came out while back. Until this is addressed I'm likely not to flip this on. Other then this we've not had any issues with it operating as the old DEP portal did.

the school manager portal itself is easy to handle. Would be nice if I could also import passwords for the students instead of using the first-time passwords from school manager, because our students have already passwords for their school accounts.

Speaking of importing students to school manager. We spend a lot of time to setup the CSV-Zip-File to get the students imported. Read the instructions very carefully, use the document word for word and differ between "needs to be", "recommended" and "may". That was the clue.

I also enabled the import to Casper but I didnt see a difference yet.