Jamf School in K-12: What’s Working Well & What Needs Improvement?

Here are some Improvements I’d like to see that come to mind. If you see something in my list that is possible already please let me know!
 

1. When selecting multiple devices, showing them all on screen for group actions or changes to be applied to.
2. Search for multple devices at once (e.g. Like pasting in multiple serial numbers separated by commas into the search field. Similar to Jamf Pro).
3. Customize dashboards.

4. Update the device record so that both the location and the assigned user (owner) can be changed in a single edit and saved once, instead of having to:

   1. Change the location and save

   2. Reopen Edit Details

   3. Assign a new owner and save again

5. Student and Teacher app - App redownloading: If a student or staff deletes an app that was pushed out to their iPad home screens, it doesn’t appear in the Student App or Teacher app for redownloading.

6. Show all groups a device belongs to regardless of which location (top-level) or specific location you are viewing the device record in.

7. Jamf Teacher - blocklist functionality instead of just allow lists. The allow list route is complicated once you involved embedded content in different LMS systems. Making it very onerous for a teacher to try and allow all the content. I’m surprised Jamf Parent can do this but not Jamf Teacher app.

The biggest issue i have with Jamf School lately is the “Notification Center”. With there update where bulk commands or exports get placed in there with a Notification, and you can’t clear or resolve them. So i currently have 76 unread notifications when i open jamf. I have already missed important notifications for our tokens, but Jamf doesn't have a time frame on when it will be fixed and can’t clear them from the back end. 

If you have this issue to and would like to try and push a fix higher up there list, here is Jamfs internal ticket number for this issue. PI140156

Jamf School for the most part does what we need.  Here are some things I’d like to see improved.

1. The ability to schedule OS updates.  For example I would like to have the system try to push out new OS updates weekly on Thursday at 3pm without me having to kick it off each week.  Teachers and students just don’t like to run updates, so we really need an easy way to try to keep things patched better.  Thankfully DDM based updates are working better at least.  
2. The ability to copy configuration profiles from a child location back to the parent one.
3. The ability to export the user installed software inventory globally would be nice for auditing.

#7 is right on the money. We pushed our staff to use the Teacher app to refocus our kids, but it ended up being an annoyance to the point I had to deploy an exam browser for web based quizzes and tests because teachers didn’t want to and did not allow list enough for them to function properly. 

What’s even worse is that the count is different depending on the screen you are on.

If I go to the ‘Inventory’ screen, it shows 84, if I go to any other screen, it shows 79.

Why the difference?

Jamf School is starting to become a joke at this point, it’s like they have no idea how they want it to work, and worse still, the Inventory screen will sometimes forget what columns I wanted, and if I include all the columns I do want, it causes a horizontal scrollbar which wasn’t present on the old inventory screen.

There isn’t even a column anymore for showing the proper storage space, the only one they have is for the max storage capacity of the device (eg. 32GB, 64GB, etc...) on the old inventory screen, it would show me how much is used and what the max is.

The other thing that has always confused me is on the device update screen, why is there a filesize difference for the update from what the actual update screen on the iPad shows?

For instance, quite often on the iPad itself it will say the update say is say 1.5GB, but on Jamf School it will report the update size as 4 or 5GB?

The update screen doesn’t properly refresh like it used to in days gone by, forcing me to often have to ‘refresh’ all the devices.

I could go on, but I don’t think anyone would like me posting a 10 page short story :P

Are you also seeing macOS 18 in the Restrictions section on your end?

It appears that macOS 18 is not listed in the official Apple version list.

Additionally, the Defer macOS 26 update option seems to be deprecated and is no longer available in the Apple Developer list.

How about installer progress bars in Jamf Teacher! Spinning circles don’t give great feedback to the end user. 

I used to pair SwiftDialog with Self Service to give user more information for Installomator downloads using Jamf Pro, which as so nice. Then they would know if it was done versus what could be an endlessly spinning process that might never finish.

-Please update the inactive date to include more than 2 months of inactivity.

-Please allow the ability to select multiple devices to put into or out of Lost Mode

-Please make the MacOS app blocklist more user friendly, especially for the default apps

-Please work with Apple to prevent repeated user popus for blocked apps on MacOS. 

Thank you.

​@ryan_w You can schedule OS Updates now with Blueprints. It can be hit or miss still on if it goes at the correct time. But you can schedule it based on a certain OS version you want your devices on, or generic like update to the newest version or newest not released within so many days. 

1. I see you already submitted a feature request for this. But for everyone else, please up vote the idea so Jamf looks at it.
   1. Just search “SCH-I-604” to locate it. 
2. I would love to have this feature added as well. End of year collection takes so long because of lost mode devices. If anyone hasn't already upvoted the idea please do.
   1. Simply search for “JN-I-25219” to locate it. 
3. I agree with this, but didn’t see a feature request so i tossed one in.
   1. Simply search for “SCH-I-675” to locate it.
4. We don’t have many macs so we don’t block apps. What pop ups are you getting when the app is blocked? 

​@red_beard is this for mac or iOS? i agree the spinning circles suck. And you wait, and wait just for it to fail to install. I also believe you can still use SwiftDialog with Jamf School. I also don’t see a feature request for this either.

Your on point here with these. I have been asking for changes to the dash board since day one. And pasting a list of serial numbers in would be amazing. We can do it in ASM and others.

And with locations if im working in the top level as an admin i shouldnt have to switch between the locations. That takes to much time and reset all of my tables and such as well. 

Number 4 on your list i was actually playing around last night of making an internal web app for us in order to change location, user, lost mode, and more in jamf. Plus also change device management in ASM as well. Mostly due to us using Apple Care to do repairs and we are an Apple SSA so we submit all of our Apple Care repairs in GSX as Apple technician. So in summer when you have hundreds of repairs, takes to long to do those one by one. I opted to submit a feature request to Manage1to1 to see if they can add it since thats our inventory, incident, and billing hub. 

It would also be really handy to have the ability to run a script on demand from the device page and maybe even from the Teacher app for MacOS.

True, however I don’t think you can do it in a reoccurring way.  I’d like to see a way to set a Blueprint update setting where it is something like push the latest version on the 2nd and 4th Thursday of each month at 3pm. 

This is the popup one gets when they click on a blocked app.
 

It stays on top of everything that is opened and won’t go away unless you try to allow it or click OK. 

Say you want to create a distraction free environment in a Mac Lab. One would have the idea to block some of the default apps to achieve that. So you spin up a Safelist & blocklist payload profile and manually add all the bundleIDs of the apps you want to block. Before you know it, you get a phone call from the teacher over the Mac lab stating students are getting the popup above and all they did was log in. What I’ve discovered is that MacOS will call certain apps, like Stocks or Calendar, by default because it has some programming function built in to do so. However, when the system calls try to use the blocked app, the popup above appears. It’s not just a one time deal either. It’s every. single. time. a system call happens. It could happen as often as once every 2-5 minutes. As I stated in the beginning, the app appears over everything that’s open and even interrupts typing. 

For these reasons alone, no one can add Calendar or Stocks or even the Mail app to a blocklist without being driven to insanity. I tried to look at blocking the popups even...you can’t block system level prompts…

I brought this to the attention of my region’s apple engineer and they said there’s not much they can do since it’s all “by design”.