How Taiwan deployed 400,000 iPads in a few weeks | Tech Lance

Is it doable to deploy a whole lot of 1000’s of iPads in a number of areas for a big group of individuals with totally different ability ranges? Completely. That is what occurred in Taiwan, the place the Ministry of Training spent tens of millions to place tens of 1000’s of tablets into the Ok-12 schooling sector.

Good schooling to make youngsters smarter

Taiwan needs to supply its youngsters world-class digital school rooms. That is why it not too long ago moved to increase the availability of tablets to major and secondary faculties, in addition to Ok-12. (It already presents high-speed Web entry and good school rooms.)

However this isn’t actually a narrative of schooling. It is a lesson in the right way to effectively deal with a posh cross-platform deployment at scale. Anybody who has executed large-scale deployments in any sort of enterprise is aware of how advanced they are often.

Planning is crucial for every thing to go properly. This extends to how you employ the gadgets you plan to implement, after all, but in addition how they are going to be used.

Do all gadgets should be manually managed and configured by IT, or can distant administration instruments scale back the workload? What about bandwidth? Can IT keep broadband QoS ranges when managing so many gadgets in such a brief period of time? What concerning the distribution? What’s the focus of technical assist? What about machine administration?

This was the gist of an fascinating case research shared on the Jamf JNUC occasion this week.

Combined platform administration

Taiwan’s Ministry of Training wished a approach to deal with Chrome, Home windows, and iOS gadgets. He had tried to work with a UEM vendor to handle them, however when the brand new implementation was deliberate, he determined to create his personal administration system.

To assist the hassle, the platform-focused MDM suppliers you selected needed to provide APIs that your personal portal might exploit. He selected to work with Apple and Jamf.

Jamf might be built-in with the ministry’s personal UEM as a result of it makes use of the Restful API, which makes use of industry-standard JSON and XML recordsdata. It additionally supplied SAML 2.0 for authentication and SSO. (The ministry wished to make use of its personal ID supplier.)

Extra challenges included the necessity to assist all of those gadgets, handle them when they’re taken house, monitor pupil habits, and guarantee tablets can’t be used to entry inappropriate content material. All this was doable with the chosen MDM.

IT departments additionally wished to have the ability to consolidate huge stock right into a single database.

Given the selection between platforms, 80% of customers selected Apple gadgets. Jamf and Apple labored collectively to resolve a few of the implementation challenges.

Fixing advanced issues, one commonplace at a time

When the challenge started, Taiwan confronted a number of further challenges, together with the truth that not all lecturers had been conversant in the expertise being carried out. Winnie Wang, Jamf Senior Gross sales Supervisor, APAC, defined how Apple and Jamf crammed the data hole.

Working collectively, they skilled 3,000 lecturers in the usage of iPads and digital academic assets. To realize this, they organized greater than 100 coaching periods in three months, and after simply two months, they’d deployed 400,000 iPads in Taiwan.

Data could be energy, however expertise alone would not resolve something. Taiwan has additionally invested in high-quality digital studying supplies and created an e-learning portal. Additionally it is value noting that Taiwan’s e-learning system depends on large information to trace college students’ progress and information them to raised academic achievement.

With such an enormous implementation problem, how did Jamf and Apple deal with it?

Deploying 10,000 iPads per day

Fairly good, it appears. Having thought of the wants of the challenge and supplied schooling and coaching periods earlier than it started, Wang’s groups assembled 30 teams of consultants to journey the nation.

They had been in a position to deploy Apple tablets at a mean fee of 10,000 iPads per day. The method came about over eight weeks, throughout which 400,000 iPads had been put in in faculties throughout the nation.

In different phrases, with just a little thought and group, it is doable to orchestrate large-scale expertise deployments in a restricted period of time. So when your IT division tells you one thing cannot be executed, perhaps it is time to encourage them to assume otherwise concerning the issues they face?

please observe me on Twitteror be part of me in AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions teams on MeWe.