Can somebody explain the check-in process

1. The client initiates based off of a setting in the JSS.
2. I believe it'll change the next checkin. So if you're set to 15 minutes and change it to 5. At the 15 minute mark it'll change it to 5. I could be wrong.
3. Check in is like a ping, it says I'm alive and some very basic info and is there any policies waiting to be ran. Recon gets full information. Profiles are a different beast that go through Apple's APNS servers and should be instantaneous nearly. Let's say you have a policy that runs on check in if Adobe Photoshop is installed. When recon runs it realizes that Photoshop is installed. Now the policy would be in scope because it detects Photoshop because of the recon, so at next check in that policy would run.
4. Checks in, potentially runs policies marked for check in.
5. Yes.

Excellent explanation of the check-in by @boberito
I would just like to add one thing. For all natural check-ins (meaning the one called by the Jamf LaunchDaemon) a random delay is added to the actual run time of any policies. The random delay will vary depending on your setup, how long the check-in time is configured for, and so on, but there may be some additional time added to the actual application of any policy beyond just the check-in amount.

So when you ask if the check-in is set for 5 minutes, does it mean the policy will apply in 5 minutes, the actual answer is "at a minimum, but could be longer".

@boberito

Thanks for all the immediate replies, I am trying to further clarify things.

1. So the client knows next time I check-in in 60 mins but we change the time to 5 mins and the update inventory (recon) is not run in the meantime so the client I think is not going to check-in within 5 minutes because its old setting is 60 mins and it doesn't know that server has changed the check-in time to 5 mins. Is that right ? because the client initiates the check-in

2. I am still looking someone to confirm this answer

Thanks @mm2270 for the addition. We are actually trying to minimize the time our Macbooks take to go into "Exam Mode". For instance, if the exam start at 9:00AM in the morning we shouldn't need to put the shared Macbooks in Exam Mode one day earlier. Similarly if the Exam finish the same day lets say @11:00AM, the shared Macbooks should automatically come out from the Exam mode for the classes/ students to general use. In this case, Check-in would decide how frequent the Exam Mode can be turned on and off on these Macbooks.

What is Exam Mode ? turns on auto-login, open the desired test application like NAP locked down browser in our case or Safari sometimes for online testing for new admission.

if you want something to happen at a set time then you'd be better off using a launchdaemon. you can get that to fire of a trigger to run a jamf policy using the jamf policy -event <triggername> or you could just run a script on the device that does the same thing.