Zero Touch with Jamf School

ASVtechnology
New Contributor III

Hi all, 

 

There is a real option to create a Zero Touch deployment with Jamf School or is only a dream?

3 REPLIES 3

Fluffy
Contributor III

Using only Jamf tools and no extra services, I don't believe it's an actual thing. I'm still learning things about managing Apple devices almost every day, and zero-touch is beyond my knowledge at this point.

It seems like zero-touch is a difficult task in general with Apple devices no matter which service you use. Recently with Big Sur, Apple has been very "user" focused and has left us with more steps to achieve things that were already in a workflow.

The best we have is Setup Assistant shortened to just enrolling a user and turning on location services. If you learn of any other methods to get it closer to zero-touch, I'd be interested.

lehmanp00
Contributor III

We have been using Apple for years now, both iOS and MacOS. JAMF Pro and now JAMF School. No zero touch, especially with iOS. 

Fluffy
Contributor III

Had some free time on my hands, so I tried Jamf School's "Zero-Touch Setup" that you can enable in Automated Device Enrollment Profiles. I don't know whether they're process is already so good, or if this option is just bad.

We have everything set to skip except for Location Service, which we enable. So, on a freshly formatted machine with the Zero-Touch enabled and an ethernet plugged in (pre-startup to be safe) leads to... almost the exact same process. Choose language and region, click past accessibility, and the one thing different is it skips network selection. Worst of all, enabling this Zero-Touch means you can't configure Onboarding. We use Onboarding, so that would make more work for us instead of less.

Seems like Jamf and Apple really push Apple Business/School Manager to make things easier for these things. We use Apple School Manager for Automated Device Enrollment, but not for managing users. I have a hard time imagining what it's like to use it for managing users and how it would make it Zero-Touch compared to as it is now.

Also, this option is not available for iOS.