5 Solutions for Your Tablet Management Woes: IT Leaders Describe Their Top 5 Pain Points in Managing iPads and Other Tablets-And How They Are Addressing the Challenges
David Raths · T.H.E. Journal Technological Horizons in Education · 2013
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At the end of the 2010-2011 school year, the San Diego Unified School District (CA) had 10,000 iPads in use was set to add 18,000 more the next semester. Teachers students were enthusiastic about using the yet the district faced a serious problem: Teachers were reporting to the instructional technology team that using Configurator mobile sync stations to add new content to 30 iPads at a time wasn't working well. would lose a few in the process end up having to do default resets, recalls Darryl LaGace, the former chief information technology officer for SDUSD. told us this solution wasn't going to scale. knew that it was risky when we started, but we didn't know how bad a problem it would be. had to stop research mobile device management solutions, says LaGace, who now works for Light-speed Systems, an MDM company. Like San Diego, school districts around the country are realizing that managing tablets brings a host of new--and time-consuming--headaches. They range from inventory asset management, to installing updating apps over the air, to enforcing policies (for instance, about camera usage or YouTube) locking profiles. It has come as something of a rude surprise to technology leaders that Google did not seem to foresee that enterprise tablet implementations would require these tools. But Sam Gliksman, the author of iPad in Education for Dummies, says this deficiency was apparent the first time the device was introduced. Remember the language in the advertising when first released the iPad? It was all about the device as a media-consumption tool, not a media-production device. he says. Apple had no idea that schools would table them up the way they have. This was a big surprise to them, they hadn't put any thought into developing management tools for them in that setting, because they didn't anticipate it. T.H.E. Journal interviewed several district technology leaders in charge of large tablet deployments about their deepest pain points during implementation end the solutions they found. Hero's what they had to say. 1) Inventory Asset Tracking The most basic need with tablet deployments is asset tracking. Mike Guerena, technology director at Encinitas Union School District (CA), which has deployed 3,500 iPads, says his district is creating a homegrown tracking system. We have been tracking iPads using an Excel spreadsheet. didn't find a good commercial solution, so it is pretty labor-intensive now, he admits. We have a person in the district office who handles tracking iPads in out, whether they are damaged, tracking whether parents have bought insurance, whether one has been damaged or not. Our goal is to automate that. Encinitas is creating a system in FileMaker Pro that will inventory all the technology equipment in the district, but needs to customize it for the data required to track iPads. The system will use bar-code scanners to link student IDs with the device serial numbers. Asset tracking also was a key issue for Norfolk City Public Schools (VA) as it assessed MDM vendors to help with its iPad rollout in 2012. In addition to its tablets, Norfolk also owns a mix of staff faculty smartphones that it wanted to manage using an MDM solution. Between the iPads smartphones, it has 1,700 mobile devices registered on the network. Directory service engineer Joakim Jader was looking for an MDM solution that would allow his teem to track where devices are how they are being used. After looking at several options, Norfolk chose AirWatch in 2012 for its strong asset-tracking reporting functions. A dashboard view allows Jader's team to track view real-time device information. Jader points out that AirWatch is not an iOS-only solution. We want the freedom in the future to move to Android or other types of devices, he says, and not be locked in by the MDM solution we chose. …