JSS - Audiobooks and Managed iPads

[tim_lane]

Hi all,

Just thought I would open up a little bit of a discussion on how - if any of you - manage the distribution of audiobooks in your environments?

I don't need huge distribution, it's only to at most 4 iPads. Theoretically at the moment it could be just the one, but I am starting to think long term and if audiobooks become a thing that my users ask for. I would like to have a nice clean way to manage them from the JSS so I don't need to take the device from the user for setup, but from when I can tell, you can't do that... thanks apple

How do you guys manage it?

Cheers!
Tim :)

[Emmert]

We've got our audiobooks and some ebooks in the JSS inhouse folder, and put those URLs into webclips in Self Service, as well as a web portal. It works well enough but content over 100 MB or so is difficult to install because there's no indicator or progress bar for it.

[mike_paul]

This is what @Emmert is talking about: Hosting In-House eBooks and Apps on a Tomcat Instance.

Thats essentially what I would recommend but Id say use a different web-sever than the JSS as that folder can be wiped out at points and it would add load to tomcat that is being used for the JSS. If your only option was Tomcat, id put the folder somewhere and do something like a symbolic link so the directory in the JSS was just a link and you wouldn't run the risk of losing that folders contents:

ln -s /path/to/books/share/ /path/to/tomcat/webapps/share/

Then in the JSS you add it as Web Clip or an in-house ebook and put the url to the share as https://jssurl.company.com:8443/share/filename.extension

You technically distribute most file type this way to an iOS device this way as long as the device has a corresponding application that can read the file type.

But I would recommend if possible that If you have the ability to setup Apache or some sort of web server (use https) on a different server just put the files there and do the same thing as above with the url for the in-house ebook.

[tim_lane]

Ahh, excellent, thanks heaps for the suggestion guys!

I implemented this on a test device yesterday and it just works great, so simple and user friendly!
A great additional to what I can do with our instance of the JSS.

[tim_lane]

Where do you purchase your audiobooks from? @mike.paul @Emmert

[mike_paul]

I haven't purchased any. I have just tested deploying all types of content to iOS devices when I was bored to see what I can do. And I work at Jamf so my recommendation to not over tax the JSS with separate work comes from that perspective.