I’d say a big draw for users is freedom over what they do with their computer and this presents obvious problems for institutions. With something like Jamf Pro though it’s possible to get the experience to be much more acceptable to the end user, you can create policies in Self Service to allow them to run updates, install software or solve other problems by themselves. If you’re using Jamf Cloud you can make this available to them all 24/7. You can even provide full operating system updates to them via Self Service.
We have a bunch of staff on MacBooks we’ve provisioned, currently our biggest problem is not being able to patch or update these while they’re away from the University (and some of them bring them in very infrequently) this leads to the odd problem where say a user’s version of Skype is out of date and they’re away from the Uni, I have no way at the moment of resolving this and the user doesn’t have admin rights to fix the issue themselves. We were looking at external facing software distribution points to resolve this but now Jamf Cloud seems the better option.
Some places do give staff admin rights but make them agree to a disclaimer, you could go down this route and that would still be preferable to no management at all.
As the person employed to manage the Macs at our University i’m obviously biased when I say there are staffing implications. Jamf Pro is set up to have multiple users with differing access rights so you can have staff using it in a casual/supplemental way but you do need somebody to understand it as a whole and its interactions with DEP etc. Also Apple move forward at a rapid pace and it requires a staffing commitment to keep up with these changes. Jamf are very good at supporting Apple’s latest features/problems but there’s a lot to get your head around. We have around 430 Macs in total, many in student labs, if you’re dealing with smaller numbers or exclusively staff provisioning there might be other solutions that work better at a smaller scale and need less commitment to staffing/knowledge.
I think on the whole our MacBook users are not as happy with their Macs as they would be if they could just do whatever they wanted with them but they seem generally satisfied and I’m hoping once we can reach them outside the institution that the remaining issues will be resolved. It’s worth pointing out also that many of our users are from our school of art and their needs can be complex.
Best wishes,
Sean
Sean Gaynor
Senior Systems Analyst (Apple)
Information Systems and Services
London Metropolitan University
T5-20
166-220 Holloway Road
London N7 8DB
020 7133 2128
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