Jamf Now Managed iPad - How To Reset Guided Access Passcode?

[joepopson]

Hey Everyone,

I wanted to share my expierence of a situation I dealt with last night, perhaps this can also help someone in a similar situation.

I have an non-verbal autistic family member who has been setting passcodes on his various iPad that he has. Sadly when we ask him what the code is he forgets and it becomes disabled. In the past we would then have to place the iPad into recovery mode via iTunes on a computer and factory restore, and then pull data back from iCloud. Long story short it used to be quite the undertaking when this was happening once a week.

I enrolled all of his iPad into JAMF now which has been wonderful and a few times after he set a device passcode we were able to reset the device by clearing the passcode in JAMF Now and he’s good to go. Additionally a few times a passcode was set and the device was disconnected from WiFi and restarted. Well it wasn’t checking in with JAMF Now until we plugged in a Lightning to USB camera connection adapter to USB to Ethernet adapter with the iPad power brick plugged in. This enabled the device to grab a LAN IP address and check in with JAMF Now.

Now we are dealing not with a device passcode, but a Guided Access accessibility passcode. Is there any way via JAMF Now to force reset or clear this? The iPad is stuck in the Safari app and basically unusable. Our family member uses iPad to communication with the Proloquo2Go App.

OK - so here is how I solved this:

The device was logged in to iCloud with Find my iPad enabled. I placed the device in lost mode which kicked the device out of Guided Access. Was able to log into the device with the 6 digit code set on iCloud.com

Then via JAMF Now disabled the passcode and manually disabled guided access.

Issue resolved and we were able to get the device back up and running without any data loss.

Let me know your thoughts on this.

Thanks all.

-Joe

[Emmert]

I'm not sure if this is applicable to Jamf Now, but in Jamf Pro, you can create a profile to put an iPad into guided access mode. Send that to the iPad (even though it's already in guided access). Once it's received that profile, revoke it and the iPad should fall out of guided access.

[joepopson]

Great point @Emmert Thanks for the reply.

[jamf_sam]

Hello @joepopson ! Really glad to hear that Jamf Now is working well for you, and thanks for the tip for anyone stuck in Guided Access. That's a really creative workflow. Guided Access is a great way to make sure someone stays within a particular app, and there are two other ways to do that I want to let you know about.

As @Emmert mentioned, Jamf Now supports Single App Mode which will accomplish the same thing if you have a Supervised device. Additionally, if you have another iPad around, you can use Apple's Classroom app to do some really great real time management as well.

We love to hear these stories and I'm going to pass this along to the Jamf Now team. Have a great day!