Clearly I don’t know everything as I’m not one of the most profitable companies in the world, but it seems like Apple wants to micro-manage their software but not accept the responsibility of deploying it. Apple has everything they need in their arsenal to be an MDM (especially with the addition of Apple School Manager), but still Apple chooses to push the responsibility to a 3rd party. Really, a cure all would be for Apple to go ahead and become an MDM. Test this with 10+ iPads instead of one, you will see what I mean. This would allow time for AC2, or possibly the Hub that all the iPads are plugged into, to catch up BEFORE the enrollment profile is installed. I propose that a delay is added in the blueprint when a naming scheme is invoked. The advantage of naming them before enrollment is to avoid having thousands of devices all named iPad. This does work however, iPads sometimes go into the MDM named “iPad” and some go in named how we want them to. smith-1, smith-2), THEN apply an MDM enrollment profile. For example, we want the blueprint to restore all devices, then name them (we have a set naming scheme, e.g. I like the idea of blueprints but I believe there’s an issue with the way blueprints are applied. MDM synchronization is really nice (however this feature is so belated we’ve learned to work around it, though that belatedness may be due to our MDM provider)įor Apple, who will probably never read this: Star to Apple!ĪC2 restore fails often (most important feature for us in AC2) As a compliment, I do appreciate that this version supports adding a supervision identity certificate from our MDM, so now both the AC2 stations and MDM can work together. The problem is not WiFi, nor is it our hub, as again, it worked in the previous version of AC2. At any rate, we recently updated AC2 (iOS 10.x also came out) and restoring fails often. Star to Apple! This is a vast difference in performance from the first version of AC2, which our Apple reps insisted the problem was our WiFi……though AC2 is a wired connection. The previous version of AC2 was working and iOS 9.3.4 was installing fine, no errors. We use AC2 in our organization to update/restore iPads right out of the box. This leaves me with the program only saving a small amount of time and fails to compensate for the large investment of time up front.ĪC2 is REALLY nice, but consistency between versions is increasingly frustrating. Instead, my installations require small batches, constant supervision for error pop-ups that hang the installation, and then re-do’s for the units that failed. Even if it wasted all our time getting it to work right, it would still probably be worthwhile if it saved our time on the back end, which is what we are all hoping for. Regardless of the time invested trying to get everything set up, the greatest problem is just that it does not do what we needed the program for: saving time in deploying a large volume of devices. Instead of a problem with method it was only a problem with the program (or possibly the iPads themselves) not uniformly accepting the same changes. I just thought I had done something wrong because some of the devices were not working.
Frequently I would go back to the drawing board due to my trial and error failing, only to find later that some of the iPads did work correctly. My experience mirrors that of many others, that days have been wasted on trial and error trying to accomplish something that is possible, but is unclear. One, the lack of documentation makes this program difficult to use. While there are some decent features in this program, in my opinion it’s failings are on three main points.
Changing the license assignment to device rather than appleID was also a good move for larger institutions where device accounts would be impossible to manage, and creating spreadsheets of codes was getting tedious.Īll in all, Configurator 1 should’ve been enhanced, not re-written.
Nice adds are the integration of VPP direct (in theory) and app updates within the app rather than iTunes.
It requires full babysitting which is increasing workload to schools/teachers and therefore techs. A device is essentially new to AC2 when connected as it has no database….this is a bigger issue than you’d guess when assigning asset numbers, apps and profiles. The removal of automated sync as well as removing the database was detrimental to the function. Get your scripting hats on if you want to do anything with it. Instead, the re-write of the app is now a very very flat application, confused with an outside working environment of Automator (not even integrated into the app interface).
There are features that, if *added* to Configurator 1, would have been a nice upgrade.