Upgrade your institution to Apple School Manager

[bnieuwoudt]

Hi,

We looking to upgrade to Apple School Manager.

From my understanding there is an integration stage of DEP and/or VPP accounts before the upgrade.

Now we have multiple VPP accounts due to the separation and different schools we have in our organisation, etc, etc. After upgrading to apple school are these VPP account still intact and manageable individually under one admin managed account?

Is Apple School Manager still in beta stage or has anyone fully implemented this and had any major impact to date?

What other things do I need to look out for? (Currently we only manage iOS devices)

Most appreciated

Brandon

[RLR]

I'd like to hear answers from some other people that upgraded their deployment accounts to Apple School Manager.

We had separate apple ID accounts for DEP and VPP. When we started the process of upgrading we where asked for all our deployment accounts (DEP/VPP/ even the program facilitator accounts which I don't think they use anymore). We gave them all our information but only our DEP account was transferred to ASM. This means our VPP purchases are still under a normal VPP account and we can't make use of the new feature to automatically enrol managed apple id's to VPP. I'm sure more features will come out in the future which will require VPP and DEP under one account. I've questioned Apple about this a couple of times and they are telling me that it's not possible to merge the VPP account with the DEP/ASM account.

Has anyone else had a separate apple ID for DEP and VPP managed to get them both merged into 1 ASM account?

[blackholemac]

We did have exactly what you said...we had a separate account we used for DEP, 8 facilitator VPP accounts and one account we used for Apple ID for Students. I found myself kinda worried, but in the end it worked out. They make your DEP account the basis for Apple School Manager. I followed this article which lays out the process of preparing to upgrade to School Manager:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT206590

In short, your DEP account is the "main one". They combined all of my VPP facilitators to the DEP account and then told me I was ready for the upgrade. I no longer have a need for the Apple ID for Students and as of now that program is dead. No apps lost or assets lost and everything that was added to our DEP account remains in our DEP account. DO NOT UPGRADE TO SCHOOL MANAGER UNTIL THAT PROCESS GETS DONE RIGHT AS THEY CAN ONLY COMBINE THE STUFF BEFORE THE UPGRADE TO SCHOOL MANAGER.

Key to this is you MUST use that form to do the migration as only a small team at Apple actually does that work and they only respond by using that web form.

[dmillertds]

I had pretty much same experience as blackhole. We migrated a couple months ago. A couple caveats: 1) if you use Managed Apple IDs, be aware you cannot set a permanent password without logging into each device with the given ID - you can only set a temp password, then the end user logs in and is forced to change it. This is a huge pain for us. 2) Even though the migration itself was pretty painless, and the VPP/DEP accounts/assets ended up intact, the app deployment has been very sketchy. This is not really related to ASM, but since we were planning on using device-based VPP app deployment in tandom with the ASM migration, it has ended up souring us on the whole "new" environment. Still working through major issues with the app deployment.

The good news is, purchasing/adding apps via the VPP website and having them show up in JSS has been pretty flawless since the migration, actually much faster than the old way.

[bnieuwoudt]

So @blackholemac you still had your individual VPP accounts (that you could purchase apps under) under the DEP account, which is the actual ASM account?

We like this separation as it's better control over different site and what they use/buy etc.

Thanks for your guys feedback.

[WBS]

I just did this upgrade yesterday, All went smooth however we choose to not combine our VPP account(we just have one for the district that everything is bought under) and DEP accounts we have 5 or so dep accounts. You dont have to combine if you choose not to. We didnt for the reason then the business department would get DEP emails. It was painless but we wont be using pretty much any of the stuff it can do. Now its just one portal to sign in to manage it all. As a backstory our district has alot of ipad2 and ipad mini 1 that are now dead to us we have less then 200 ipad mini2 that will be our only mobile apple devices. I have set up all of our apple devices as device based app installs to student/teacher accounts is pointless to me. It seems 5 years to late. We will be getting chromebooks to replace all of our ipad 2 and ipad mini 1.

[michael_devins]

One reason that a school may want to merge DEP and VPP accounts before upgrading is to support the new Auto-Register VPP User capability that shipped with Casper Suite 9.96.

This new capability allows for an IT Admin to automatically register and associate a Managed Apple ID to a VPP account (no invitation for end users) for the purpose of deploying user-based iBooks (or Apps). This feature requires that the VPP token be associated with your Apple School Manager instance.

[cdenesha]

Briefly:

Definitely decide whether to merge VPP into DEP before you migrate. There is a KB article for preparing

Your administrator accounts are all converted to Managed but I haven't seen any issues with it.

DEP is still DEP inside of ASM, it is done the same way

VPP accounts still buy their apps/books the same way they always have.