Migrating user data to Managed Apple IDs

[bsmith93]

Has anyone here done a mass migration from the old institutional Apple IDs to Managed Apple IDs? I manage the Apple devices at a school district, and I need to get about 500 staff members moved over to Managed Apple IDs, but I am concerned about the loss of any data that may be stored in iCloud Drive (and not on the device) on the old Apple IDs. Has anyone here gone through something similar? I’m looking for any suggestions anyone may have. Thanks!

[blackholemac]

I led a session on doing Azure integration and migrating to Apple School Manager. It may cover many of the nuts and bolts questions.

https://www.jamf.com/resources/videos/apple-school-manager-and-azure-federation-one-school-districts-story/

As to your question on iCloud data, this is where you’re going to want to consider your timing of this migration. To be blunt, a Managed Apple ID and a personal Apple ID (even an institutionally created one) are separate pools of storage. You could download all the assets from personally created Apple ID manually and make them available to your user but you cannot convert what was a personally created Apple ID to a managed one. In terms of apps themselves, this is not a problem. You could either use MDM to recall them and assign apps to devices or in a pinch, the Apple ID you use for commerce can be different from the one used for iCloud. That doesn’t cover app data though.

If you were a commercial customer, you might be thinking...”we don’t use Apple School Manager, we use Apple Business Manager. They are basically the same system with slightly different skin ones and minor changes in functionality. Here’s a document on ABM and Azure if you need it. The process (and gotchas) is similar to the one I outlined in my video regarding school manager.

ABM document: https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-business-manager/what-are-managed-apple-ids-tes78b477c81/1/web/1

[bsmith93]

Thank you! This was helpful indeed.

[cdenesha]

We are doing migrations ourselves, and I don't know of a way to migrate app data from one iCloud to another - apps will lose their iCloud connections and thus their data when you sign out of the personal Apple ID. If it is a document, theoretically it could be shared with the new MAID..

[bsmith93]

The way I've handled this on a very small scale is by moving documents from the personal iCloud Drive to the On This iPad storage, then moving it to the iCloud Drive of the MAID. For 500 devices, though, I'd be looking at about 500 labor hours. It's just not feasible.

I think the way I'll have to handle this is by creating a few support documents that detail to staff members how they can upload crucial files to their Google Drives, then share them back into their native apps after signing in to the MAID. I won't be able to cover everything this way, and some users will definitely not feel comfotable doing this themselves, but I'm hoping it will help.

[blackholemac]

Another way you could do it is have the end users mount their iCloud Drive on a Mac desktop and pull stuff off that way. You could in theory have them log into iCloud.com on any computer and do it that way.

I'll also offer a bit of insight into a typical user base such as mine....I give them a task and I know going in, I will NOT get 100% compliance...I will have 50-60% that will handle it...10-20% won't read the email and the rest will have issues in some form...many times I can coach them with help but let's face it, there will be some handholding or "do it for them".

I went back to my video and I apologize for not being the greatest presenter in the world, but I can say to pay special attention to the part of it where I talk about mission critical or VIP accounts. In our case it wasn't the admin building necessarily that was a problem...they actually were good at following directions...it was the multitude of tech and service accounts that we used that had to be accounted for. In short we made the migration, but it involved the right timing and the right actions at the right times to get it done right. I got lucky in that we were refreshing the staff iPads that summer anyway so a bit of chaos was already expected by the end users.