1-to-1 with basically 1 man

Speakers: Bob Gendler

Level: Intermediate, Lecture

Excerpt: From unboxing the laptop to putting it in the hands of a student, faculty or staff member, discover how one person completes this process for hundreds of laptops in just a matter of days. Learn a workflow that makes this a one-touch, automated process that mixes configuration profiles, scripts and policies. Come see why it does not require a large IT department to handle a 1-to-1 Apple program.

Description: Attendees will learn our workflow, from unboxing the laptop to putting it in the hands of a student, faculty, or staff member. One person completes this process for hundreds of laptops in just a matter of days. This is a 1 touch process for us, due to our use of automation using a mix of configuration profiles, scripts, and policies. It does not require a large IT department to handle our 1-to-1 program.

We use configuration profiles to log them into our 802.1x wireless, configure the login screen based on what grade, configure Office, configure Chrome’s defaults and blocking certain extensions

Scripts are used to automate the installation and setup of CrashPlan, setting the owner and department of the laptop in Casper using information from Active Directory, unlocking certain system preferences so that students who are not administrators can use them, installing classroom monitoring software, content filtering, set a firmware password on student laptops, and setting certain software to auto update.

Policies and scripts also help us to maintenan our system such as to make sure filtering software is running correctly, the students are connected to the proper wifi, crashplan is backing up, and updating certain software (flash, java, etc).

When a laptop leaves St. Andrew’s, we use a Self-Service policy to remove the admin account, promotes the user to admin, deletes software, removes the firmware password, as well as remove the JAMF framework.

Because of the automation the Casper Suite allows we are able to manage a large installation with a small technology staff.


About the speaker

Bob Gendler – Apple Platform Engineer/1-to-1 Coordinator – St Andrews Episcopal

Bob Gendler is an Apple fanatic using Apple products as far back as the Apple //gs. He graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and has been in the technology field ever since. He was previously the Technology Coordinator at an international nonprofit but has been the Laptop Program Coordinator at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School since June 2012.

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