Moving students up a year level

[lhscasper]

Hi All,

I have about 1350 ipads under management and wish to move the students up a year level. We currently use the Department field to store their field level, and this is linked to the department field in the Active Directory.

I had thought I could just go in and use an SQL update statement to move the departments, and tried this with one of the smaller year levels. However, even though the "department_id" field update, it appears that saved searches and smart mobile device groups aren't being updated and are in fact "remembering" the original department id, even though if you click through onto the device it shows the new department string - very strange.

What would be the best method for updating all 1350 device Department fields in an efficient manner?

Cheers,
Chris.

PS. I'm wondering if the saved searches and smart device membership get the department from a different location rather than the department_id from the locations entries?

[andyparkernz]

hi Chris,
With our OS X machines, we do a similar thing and look up into the Department field from AD. When the machine is inventoried, the LDAP data is updated.
I'm not sure if this happens with iOS, but may be worth checking.
Andy

[elliotjordan]

A while ago we switched from using "grade level" to "graduation year" and never looked back.

However, I understand that might not get you where you need to go, since it sounds like you need the iPads to have a different set of apps/policies when grade levels change — is that correct?

Elliot

[lhscasper]

Hi Elliot,

I've considered setting up "enrolment year" instead of year level, and in fact I had setup some smart groups to help me with that but it didn't turn out the way I had planned. Seems there's no real way to get around waiting for all 1300 units to inventory, which means I'm going to be about 100 short as there appears to be about 100 iPads in my system which simply don't update, and there doesn't seem to be any way to force that update.

Cheers,
Chris.