iOS 7 and Education

[steelopus]

Here's a new page from Apple highlighting some of the improvements iOS 7 will bring to the education market:
http://www.apple.com/ios/ios7/education/

Everything looks promising. I'm especially excited for the new VPP options:

The App Store Volume Purchase Program now offers institutions the ability to assign apps to users while keeping full ownership and control over app licenses. Institutions purchase app licenses through the VPP website, and can use their MDM solution to assign apps to students, faculty, and staff over the air. Students can enroll with their personal Apple IDs without providing it to their institution, and apps are placed in their purchase history for self-service download, or are installed automatically via MDM. Apps can be revoked at any time and reassigned to other students. In addition to iOS apps, VPP now also supports the purchase of Mac apps and even books, so students can be provided all the tools they need to get their work done.

[Chris_Hafner]

If I could load a GIF of someone dancing here (OK, I haven't checked) I would! Let's hope this happens!

[CasperSally]

Promising except maybe for those who have spent thousands in VPP apps. So far nothing about how to transfer those VPP purchases to the new licensing model. Hope they figure out how to make that happen.

[mm2270]

That is indeed promising! I don't work on the iOS side of the house, but the fact that they seem set to address this long standing thorn in everyone's side and also for Mac apps as well is really good news! It'll mean all the insane workarounds we need to use now to deploy MAS apps will be (hopefully) a thing of the past.

[dgreening]

I am interested to know how the new VPP licensing model will work for organizations which implement multiple VPP Program Facilitator accounts. We have one for each of our schools, and also have an aliased iTunes account for redemption for each of our schools.

I also want to know if previously purchased iOS devices can be enrolled into the new Apple enrollment facilitation service.

[AndyBeaver]

3 years from now we can all look back and say,"Remember the days when you had to download 50 sheets of 200 codes from 3 facilitator accounts (depending on where the funds came from) for 20 different apps that get installed on 30 instances of Configurator each with a unique apple id, and pray that when a device is unsupervised the code returns...." Ahh hopefully the good old days are behind us.

[RWitt]

My issue is we have 1500 ipads that are less than a year old that can't use airdrop. That feature alone was making me look forward to iOS7. The downside is you have to have the 4th gen ipad for that to work. Grrrrr at least the app management side looks promising. The downside is I am prepping my iPads now not months from now when they roll out with 7. Unfortunately I have at least one more year of plugging in and supervising the old fashioned way.

[FastGM3]

Here's a pretty good video that describes these new features, it's from the WWDC.

https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/

Then find "Managing Apple Devices"

Seems to me the next version of Casper is going to have to huge changes to take advantage of these new features!