Bradley C

At the Jamf Nation User Conference, IBM has announced that it is open sourcing its Mac@IBM provisioning code. The code being open-sourced offers IT departments the ability to gather additional information about their employees during macOS setup and allows employees to customize their enrollment by selecting apps or bundles of apps to install.

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Jamf has just announced that it is adding support for Microsoft Azure Active Directory to Jamf Pro. This announcement comes on the heels of the partnership that Jamf announced last at its user conference. Organizations who use Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) and Jamf can now skip creating a local account on macOS, and go straight to using Active Directory. It’s now easy to use Azure Active Directory on a Mac.

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I was recently in Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta, and I visited the Microsoft store, the Apple store, and a pop-up Amazon shop. As I wandered through all three of them, I began to ponder the state of each company when I look ahead to the next generation of consumer technology. As I walked through each of them, this thought kept popping into my head: do Apple products warrant their premium price? Are Apple products a premium experience, or is it all about the Apple brand?

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When my school came back from fall break, I had a teacher report that one of her classroom iPads had gone missing. I get messages like this quite often, but they are almost always in the building. I can verify this by logging into my Jamf Pro dashboard, and see which IP address it last “checked in” from. Our school has a static IP address, so the iPads will also show that as the last known IP address. I can also have Jamf Pro send me an email if one checks in off campus, I had actually turned this off as we had a student who was at St. Jude off and on last year, so I disabled the alerts while she was there, and I forgot to turn them back on. I had originally set this feature up to help prevent school iPad theft.
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Anyone that has known me for any length of time knows that I take organizing my photo library very seriously. We can be headed home from a birthday party for one of our kids, and I’ll ask my wife to cull through the photos we took, and add them to an album.

One of the best things about smartphones is you can take 1,000 photos in twenty minutes, but it’s also one of the worst things. I know most people will take a burst of photos, and then never go back through them. They’ll be left with a bunch of copies of a similar shot. In my opinion, it’s a lot easier to enjoy your library, when you take the time to clean up iPhone photos. The problem is that it’s time-consuming using the built-in tools.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about new Apple Music features that I hope are coming in iOS 13 and macOS 10.14. Earlier this year, I wrote up an Apple Music vs. Spotify comparison that summed up exactly how I feel about both services. Both are really good.

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Every technology deployment has its time in the sun. From the initial unboxing to the initial deployment, and to the various great moments, all deployments reach a point when it’s time to replace them. Over the years, I’ve done many Apple hardware refreshes, and they are a lot of fun. And one question that always has to be answered is what do you do with your existing hardware? Do you sell it? Do you keep using it? Let’s answer the question of what do you do with old laptops and iPads?

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I’ll make a statement that might be unpopular: Apple shouldn’t promote their privacy stance to schools when they aren’t offering a compelling service that schools can sign up for that replaces G-Suite. They’ve built solutions for schools that are siloed off from most of the student information systems without making an identity management system. They’ve created solutions (like Classkit, Apple Business Manager, and Apple School Manager) that don’t 100% replace anything else a school or business has. They’ve simply added more overhead to deploying iPad. Apple proclaiming their stance on privacy while also accepting a 9 billion payment from Google just makes them look hypocritical. If Apple is really concerned about privacy, they need to be building tools to replace what Google offers enterprise and education customers. Let me explain how.

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Making The Grade is a weekly series from Bradley Chambers covering Apple in education. Bradley has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.

When it comes to enterprise device management, every platform company (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.) has their own style of management. Google (with Chromebooks) has built a complete end to end solution for managing its devices. When I say end-to-end, I mean that when you buy Chromebooks, you also buy the management tool sold by Google.
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I’ve written a lot about iCloud Photos at 9to5Mac. I think about managing my photo library more than I’d care to admit. I’m always thinking about additional back up measures I can put into place, or ways Apple could improve the service (be sure to check out my Google Photos vs. iCloud Photos roundup). iOS 12 is now on the market, so we know all the new features that are available this year. My mind is already turning to iOS 13, though. I hope it’s a big year for iCloud Photo Library. Here are the features I consider to be “low hanging fruit”.

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Making The Grade is a weekly series from Bradley Chambers covering Apple in education. Bradley has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.

Apple Watch Series 4 was announced at Apple’s annual iPhone event, and it looks like a promising upgrade for Series 3 owners (and especially Series 0,1, and 2 owners). With the ability to detect AFIB with 98% accuracy, reduced bezels, and additional complications, Series 4 Apple Watch looks to be a hit.

As I do every week on my Making The Grade column, I like to look at things from the perspective of a teacher or student. This week, I want to consider the benefits of an Apple Watch for a teacher. I think this industry is perfect for Apple Watch, and I want to explain why.

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I’ve written a lot about identity management when it comes to Apple deployments here on 9to5mac. A popular identity management solution is Active Directory (AD) from Microsoft. Mac IT admins have loved the syncing of credentials between AD, but have long hated the process and frustration of binding Mac to AD. NoMad was built to solve that problem. I was actually discouraged by a systems engineer from Apple years ago against binding to AD.

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When it comes to file storage for Mac and iOS users, there are multiple options. Today, I want to look at iCloud Drive vs Dropbox.

When I think back to the early days of iPhone and iPad (and even my Mac life around that time), Dropbox was so ingrained into my workflows that I couldn’t ever see it leaving. On the flip-side, I’ve have been using Dot Mac/MobileMe/iCloud since before the iPhone was released. Years ago, Apple’s storage solution for Dot Mac/MobileMe was iDisk, and it was not good. Dropbox came along and made everything else look ancient.

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Making The Grade is a weekly series from Bradley Chambers covering Apple in education. Bradley has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.

iOS 12 and macOS Mojave have both been in the news this week. At the iPhone announcement event, Apple announced that iOS 12 would be coming on Monday, and macOS Mojave to launch on the 24th. For IT administrators, when Apple’s software update season hits full swing there can be a sense of dread. Right now, we are running the most stable versions of iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra. We’ve had an almost a full year of bug fixes, so things are running as smooth as they will. As we enter a new season of X.0 updates, we often hit the rest button on stability. While iOS 12 has been very stable in the beta periods, it’s still a new OS. Third-party app providers will also need to update for stability as well. The question I want to help answer today is: When should you update managed iPad, iPhones, and macOS devices?

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I’ve been a customer of JAMF for many years, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Whenever people ask me why I use JAMF Pro, I always say, “It’s like having an Apple assistant in my office.” Using the platform to manage my iOS devices dramatically improves my workflows.

With iOS 12 and tvOS 12 on the horizon, JAMF has announced JAMF Pro 10.7. As with previous years (dating back to 2012), JAMF has zero-day support for both of these products. What does zero-day support mean? It means support for new features, baseline compatibility, and no impact to critical workflows.
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If there’s one app I’d be lost without on macOS, it would Alfred. I’ve been using Alfred for years, and I continually discover new ways to use it. So what is Alfred?

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