iWorks and iLife licensing for OS X and iOS

With VPP license codes, organizations can purchase apps in bulk from the App Store and distribute licenses to end users with the App Catalog. Organizations maintain ownership of the app license, and can revoke and reassign licenses at any time.

New iOS Device automatically come with Free Licenses for Keynote, Numbers, Pages which you could assign to a corporate managed Apple ID (Y), while the actual User has a different Apple ID (Z).

This way you retain the Licenses associated with the Device & the User can temporarily download managed Apps with his own Account, which can be taken off his Account, since Licensed by the Business and only assigned to the Users Apple ID.

From what I understand, Apple has a method to convert the included "free" licenses to managed licenses for the organization. You may want to get in touch with your Apple rep to see if this is an option. Aside from that, the first user to sign in to the App Store on the device takes ownership of the Apps.

Luckily for us it hasn't been an issue as our student iPads aren't re-assigned. There are a few odd cases of forgotten IDs or other circumstances that have caused the licenses to be lost, in those cases we just keep a handful of managed licenses on hand to assign out as needed.

@H3144-IT

We are only using one AppleID that we create for the students but that they ultimately will retain control over once they leave the county. If we technically have two licenses per iPad, one that can belong to the first user of the iPad and one 'managed' license per iPad, I don't think we really care about the non-managed license unless there's something I'm missing. If this is the case, my plan would be to just let the user of the iPad have a free iWorks/iLife license and then push out managed licenses later. The only detriment would be if this interrupts our deployment flow of the Apps somehow. What happens when I scope a managed license to someone who's already redeemed iWorks/iLife using that same AppleID, e.g.?

Or do we just say forget the "free" licenses and go managed all the way, leaving the "free" licenses to rot?

@VT-Vincent

We seem to have two licenses per iPad. I have 5,000 managed licenses sitting in Casper/Apple's VPP. I know we have had a few users install iWorks/iLife on their own despite our request to not do that, yet we are still showing 5,000 managed licenses. This seems to indicate that people could redeem a license, and a second managed license could be used on the iPad later if necessary...almost like a second license is just being generated out of thin air. Is this possibly something that Apple just didn't properly account for and doesn't want people to know? Or maybe I have it all wrong.

Honestly I don't think Apple cares. They are essentially giving away the iWork suite for free now anyway. If I were you I would just issue all the iWork apps out through MDM and be done with it. If you have enough licenses for all your devices it doesn't matter since you can reclaim them later. If you issue it though MDM and they have already downloaded it you still lose that license.

I wouldn't want to track which user has an iPad that has been "recycled" and who has new iPads.

Use VPP managed distribution and don't worry about those "free" copies, IMO.
when you use the VPP managed distribution you have 5000 licenses you will never lose which you can assign to every user, and you will never lose any licenses, whereas doing it any other way you will slowly deplete your licenses.