Meraki vs Casper as an iOS MDM

[Davies]

Hello, our boss is wanting to drop Casper Suite for our iOS deployment (but keep for our OSX devices) and save money and switch to Meraki MDM. We previously used Meraki system manager for our MDM, but switched to Casper November 2014.

Are there any real advantages using Casper over Meraki for our iOS MDM? I have had look at both of our MDM portals and searched online and there is not a great deal in it in what I am seeing. I hope that I am incorrect, but any advice would be definitely be appreciated.

Many thanks in advance

David

[CasperSally]

I don't know much about Meraki, but JAMF prides themselves on supporting new OS's very quickly (usually day of). Of course, sometimes there are bugs with the new releases, so you can't always install them into production right away. I'm running into this now, would like the iOS8 features but there's a bug in 9.6 series that I can't live with in production.

[Davies]

Thank you for the response, I would much prefer to keep all our apple devices in one portal. We currently have JSS 9.61, I'm not seeing any issues with it so far. Would you happen to know what the bug is?

Thanks again

[CasperSally]

The bug for me is on the Mac side. For me, I'm being burned by everything being in one portal because I can't upgrade both unless they're both working in test environment. I'm considering moving to another MDM just to break out of this loop I'm in.

Whenever you move MDM's, you have to re- enroll devices though, so there's that obstacle against moving depending on how many devices you have.

[gachowski]

I always like saying this, last time I checked the JSS license is for as many as you want : ) ... I think I would have one JSS for Mac and one for iOS :)

C

[Davies]

Not sure what you mean by being in one portal? is it upgrading JSS?

Yep, going have to re-do all our iOS devices as guy that did the enrolment did not use configurator to supervise them moving back over to Meraki. Not his fault though, but as punishment he has to wipe them all again :)

[rtrouton]

@CasperSally,

In your situation, since you can set up a Casper policy to re-enroll MDM certs on a Mac (https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/automatically-fixing-mdm-certificate-enrollment-with-ca...), it may make sense to stand up another Casper server and move your Macs to that. That gives you that logical separation without having to deal with a separate solution.

[mcarasso]

@dickdavies,

We did a 1:1 ios device role out at 2 of our schools the biggest differences between the 2 role outs were the automations that the jss does by default things like

LDAP to device information record smart groups vpp invitations by smart groups app assignments by smart group

between inventorying the device manually and setting up app invitations and assignments the odd way meraki does it. Deployment took 3 times as long for ios. Meraki is great in its own way buy honestly wouldnt recommend it for a large deployment.

[Davies]

Thank you mcarasso for your reply, I will note these comments and add this to my report on to my I can justify keeping Casper for iOS MDM.

One question, new to Casper really, I have just ran an online search for 'LDAP to device information record', couldn't find anything relating to casper, would this be further info on the user AD account?

[calumhunter]

LDAP = Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
Basically it is a method/protocol to access a directory ie Active Directory, Open Directory etc etc

So yes you could and most people do use it to get information from AD users/groups/computers and import that into the device record in the JSS

also +1 on separating out the JSS for OS X and iOS, that's a great tip

[davidacland · Accepted solution]

HI, we use Meraki at some clients sites and Casper for others. Like them both but Meraki (at least the free version) is quite limited on features. It can do the basics but certainly isn't as feature rich as Casper. For example, Meraki can't do profiles for:

• IMAP
• LDAP
• Calendar
• Contacts
• Subscribed Calendars
• Domains
• Certificates

Not a full list but it gives you an idea.

[Davies]

Thank you all for your replies, got a bit to go on here now. Will look into the comments in further detail.

I really do appreciate the time you all took to reply. Great community.

David