What is Apple School Manager?
Apple School Manager is a service that lets you buy content, configure automatic device enrollment in your mobile device management (MDM) solution, and create accounts for your students and staff. Apple School Manager is accessible on the web and is designed for technology managers, IT administrators, staff, and instructors.
Who should use Apple School Manager?
Currently there are two specific uses of Apple School Manager at Duke, intended for IT administrators that support Apple endpoint devices (macOS and iOS). Apple School Manager should be used for initial provisioning of devices, using the “device manager” role, and assigning Apple Mac / iOS App Store purchases, using the “content manager” role.
Duke & Duke Health share a single enterprise instance of Apple School Manager.
Terminology and definitions:
- MDM – Mobile Device Manager, server software running at Duke used to administer devices. JAMF Pro and AirWatch are MDM services in use at Duke and Duke Health.
- ADE – Automated Device Enrollment (Formerly called DEP), the Apple service
- ASM – Apple School Manager, a service run by which is used to configure DEP and assign Apple devices (macOS and iOS) to specific MDM servers. The ASM service also manages purchasing and assigning of App Store licensing (Mac and iOS).
- Apple ID – The user identity specific to Apple provided services, not in any way connected to Duke NETIDs. In ASM, all IT admins will be using Enterprise Managed Apple IDs. The enterprise managed Apple IDs are very different than ordinary “individual” Apple IDs and do not have access to the majority of services normally accessible by individual Apple IDs.
How does Apple School Manager enroll devices in a Duke MDM service?
The Apple School Manager service (hosted by Apple) allows the Duke IT admin with a device manager role to assign Apple device serial numbers to specific “servers”. The term “servers” in the ASM service refer to a specific DEP. For a brief walkthrough on how to add devices in ASM see the endpoints@duke Jamf Wiki page located here.
Important and useful reference material:
Apple School Manager documentation
Endpoints@Duke | Apple School Manager Wiki
