Parity Between Jamf School and Pro Apps (Teacher, Parent)

[sdecook]

We are current school district that has been using Jamf Pro for roughly 4 years now and switched from a different MDM provider before that. We have roughly 11,500 students and 1,000 or more staff that all have iPads. Back when we made the switch to Jamf Pro they had not yet acquired/implemented Jamf School. Now that Jamf School exists there are a lot of updates and features that School has that are absent from Pro. My understanding is that Pro was supposed to be EVERYTHING in the Jamf catalog while School was an easy to use and setup MDM.

Right now we have the Teacher, Parent and Student apps that are completely lacking in great features that could be used by school systems utilizing Jamf Pro. Does anyone know if there is a plan to have the same features on both platforms? We also have labs of Macs and a hundred or more teachers utilizing MacBooks so switching MDMs isn't exactly on my list of wants at the moment, this would mean losing features on the Mac side or having 3 management platforms for iOS, Mac and Windows devices.

When it comes down to it I would like to just see the same feature set that School gets inside of Jamf Pro.

[jphillips]

This is a good question that I've been wondering this year, too.

We're a district that has been using Pro for about 8 years and have 120k student population. We started a 1:1 iPad program with all of our Elementary students this year, which equates to about 40k iPads that are all going home everyday.

We were really looking forward to utilizing Jamf Parent, but decision makers were wary on the lack of security Pro offers for enrolling children iPads into the Jamf Parent app. Their concern was if Student A enrolled Student B's iPad into their own Parent app (Pro simply allows the Parent app to scan a QR code from a student's Self Service, while Jamf School allows you to restrict access to the Parent app based on parent email addresses imported into Jamf School).

Until this gets implemented (or some other comparable parent authentication method) into Pro, we can't use this wonderful app.

[Salty]

Well - I stepped aside from the strategy part at Jamf a while back; however,  in all of our Matter Innovation Hubs (14), almost 5,000 students in all,  with "shared-iPad" - multi-user logins - we use Jamf School. I'm aware of several larger Pro customers that have switched their iPad and Apple TV deployments to Jamf School and kept their Mac devices in Pro. While 3 years ago the Pro or School debate was tied closely to Mac management needs with a few critical needs on the Mac side for some organizations, now - Jamf School is the first suggested product unless there is a specific use case. Jamf has presented on several occasions that most new "innovative" educational feature supporting classroom leaning will be first brought to Jamf School. Sometimes immediately to Jamf Pro - sometimes with less features, and sometimes not at all. It could also be looked at from a priority stand point - Jamf School priority has resources dedicated towards teacher tools while Pro has many competing verticals and industries for prioritization. 

I'd love to hear from some of the Pro customers that are now running both.