Speakers: James Chiaramonte & Dylan McKenna
Level: All Levels, Lecture
Excerpt: In our presentation ‘From Imaging to Installation in 1 semester’, we’ll explain how we transitioned from an imaging based workflow to leveraging Apple School Manager and Jamf Pro for the provisioning of our 230 macs and 70 iOS devices in our higher education environment. We’ll give examples of how we package apps and setup policies for installation at enrollment, and we’ll discuss the challenges and issues we overcame while deploying High Sierra and Mojave, including the transition to APFS and the death of NetInstall.
Description: In the summer of 2018, we represented our University of 5000 students and 230 Macs at the MacAdmins conference for the first time in several years. At that time, we were imaging all of our Apple devices with tools such as Meraki, Munki, Deploy Studio and NetInstall. After the conference we redesigned our provisioning workflow and fully embraced installation rather than imaging for our 98 lab iMacs in time for students to arrive for the Fall 2018 semester.
In this presentation, we’ll walk through our Apple School Manager and Jamf Pro based provisioning workflow for labs and employees. We’ll discuss installing macOS and how we build packages and setup policies that run at enrollment to install software, add printers, and run scripts. We’ll also discuss the different configuration profiles that we have in place to keep the user experience in our labs consistent and enforce network and information security polices. We’ll discuss our challenges and solutions for things such as setting the hostname in a lab environment, binding to AD, mounting network drives, converting from HFS+ to APFS, provisioning within a Cisco ISE environment, and moving to Mojave. We’ll look at how we leverage Pre-Stage Enrollments to define Smart Groups and scope Configuration Profiles for both macOS and iOS. Let us show you how we transitioned from imaging to installation in one semester.
About the speakers
Dylan McKenna (Twitter: @mckmatter) – Systems Administrator – Robert Morris University
I am a Systems Administrator at a mid-major University in Pittsburgh PA with about 5000 students. We provision and manage 4 Mac Labs totaling 98 iMacs and another 130 employee Macs. We also manage ~70 iOS devices (mostly iPads). We do most of our management via an on-premise Jamf Pro instance. We have fully transitioned from imaging to provisioning via School Manager in the last year with both our computer lab deployments and employee device deployments.
James Chiaramonte – Sr. Systems Engineer – Robert Morris University
I am a Sr. Systems Engineer at a private university in Western Pennsylvania with an enrollment of 5,000 students. We have close to 100 Apple mobile devices and around 225 Macs that we manage via JAMF. I manage our university’s Information Technology Help Desk of 4 full-time employees and 8 student workers. We are responsible for the synergy of technology around campus for 100+ classrooms and another dozen or so conference rooms.