Working with Jamf School
Planted November 15, 2024
I’ve been using Jamf School at work for 3 years now. This is the first year (2024) in which I believe ALL of our faculty and staff Macs are enrolled in JS. Previously to the 21-22 school year, the school paid for Jamf Pro to manage the iPads for the K-5th graders and used imaging to deploy the Macs. I arrived in 2021, and that summer we began to move our devices and configurations to Jamf School. I and asked “Why aren’t we using Jamf on the Macs too?” and immediately started deploying the new fleet of Macbook Air M1’s in Jamf School through Apple School Manager, which was probably half of the fleet at the time. These days, I’m trying to do things the Jamf way. Starting in 2023 and finishing in Feburary of 2024, I earned my Jamf Pro Expert certificate, and learned way more about how Jamf + Apple’s MDM framework works.
It’s been a long time since I wrote a blog post, so I wanted to scribble down what’s been up recently:
Deploying Jamf Connect to already working computer labs
We bought Jamf Connect licenses to enable “Sign in with Google” to the Macbook Air loaner computers as well as our labs computers. The loaners were very easy since they are basically just blank slates ready to go. I did have to change a configuration to not prompt the users to try to sync with already existing accounts like “admin” but it seems like everyone likes it so far.
The Labs have been a different story. I’ve rolled it out to the Yearbook Lab so far, which as 14 machines all with Adobe installed on them. The students have licenses assigned to their accounts and they typically use Lightroom to import their photos before saving to the “yearbook drive”, but there are still files on the “yearbook” shared account they have been using.
Scripts in Jamf School
If you want to do anything fancy in Jamf School, like you can just “do” in Jamf Pro, you’ll be writing scripts. I used bolt.ai to write a quick little landing page for my Jamf School Collection. Most recently, a “On Login” script to migrate the data from /Users/yearbook/Desktop
plus a few other locations to a shortcut in /Users/Shared/
and placing that shortcut on the $currentSignedInUser
’s desktop. (Here is an example, but not the same example as the example I just exampled.)
For now, that’s all. We’ll see if all this work is null and void if we really do move to Jamf Pro this upcoming summer like I hope we do. -AS