JAMF Software Podcast

"I understand what certificates do. So, now what?" We'll get technical about why certificates have become so prevalent in the JSS. Certificates offer a huge benefit by helping keep the JSS secure. We'll discuss what other advantages they provide, why we use them in so many different places, and how can you leverage them to secure your environment. If you want the answers to "How and why?" when it comes to certificates—this is the session for you.

Since its inception, the JSS REST API has been the shining star amongst the other JSS APIs—and for good reason. It lets you acquire and modify aspects of the JSS in a simple and elegant manner. But—as new versions were released—it became apparent that administrators not only wanted to know what was in the JSS, but also when certain events were taking place. To help solve this problem, we introduced another powerful API known as the JSS Events API. With this, you can create custom hooks to monitor events such as policy completions, smart group changes, configuration profile deployments, and much more. Join us to learn how the JSS Events API can help enhance your organization's use of the Casper Suite.

When it comes to the Casper Suite, Paul confesses "I don't think we could survive without it." As a global, corporate organization, the ability to know what's going on with your Macs—both near and far—is crucial, especially when the productivity of your end users is on the line. Paul talks with us about how they use the Casper Suite for preventing interruption of their end users' work and keeping track of valuable assets.

Learn first-hand how one school district handles app management for over 800 iOS devices—distributed to both students and faculty members. During this session we'll walk through the goals of app management, the planning efforts for app distribution, and the logistics behind deploying and tracking apps on these devices. We will also share other app management strategies and what lessons have been learned from managing such a variety of apps.

Take it from a professional managed service provider—a management solution is "not something that's optional anymore." Joe Schram from Sparktivity sits down to talk about how his company uses the Casper Suite to help clients manage Macs in the enterprise. As many of Sparktivity's clients have never had a clear view of what inventory they have in their environment, Joe talks about the impact the reporting feature of the Casper Suite instantly has on them when they're brought on. He also expresses his appreciation for the tight integration the Casper Suite has with other enterprise tools—helping Sparktivity offer a full tier of services to their clients to manage their Apple environment.

In response to the rapid growth of Mac users at the University of Oxford, their IT department has developed the Managed Mac Platform (MMP)—using the Casper Suite as a robust framework to deploy their Macs on a large scale. This program has allowed the University of Oxford's IT team to build and maintain their Macs, while remaining flexible for every different Mac use case across the university. In this session we will discuss the architecture of the MMP, as well as share the enlightening solutions developed by their IT team for common OS X management challenges seen in education.

"What does this certificate do?! I thought I had one already!" In this session we'll help you make heads or tails of all the certificates the JSS uses to communicate with the devices you manage on a daily basis. We'll examine which certificates are necessary, learn where to get them from, and cover the basics of what they do.

Adobe's products can be a challenge to deploy, manage, and integrate into high-stress production environments or the chaos of a classroom lab. Does it take a skilled ninja with a mastery of Adobe's alphabet soup (AAMEE, AUSST, APTEE, RUM, and xDA) and JAMF Software solutions to survive? Or does it take meditation on how you can become "one" with the optimal production workflow? Jody Rodgers, Senior Product Manager from Adobe, will be shaving heads or sharpening swords depending on your path.

Jared is new to the IT scene, but so far he has found the Casper Suite to be incredibly intuitive as he learns to manage Apple devices across the board—from inventory, to imaging, to Self Service. As many teachers in Jared's school district prefer to be independent when it comes to technology, find out how he uses the Casper Suite to ensure instructor's individual needs are met without hovering over them or taking on extra work.

As brand new users of the Casper Suite, Steve and his team like its intuitiveness and ease-of-use in their nearly 100 percent Apple environment. After a year of testing out a one-to-one iPad program with their instructors, Steve's team has recently rolled out about 700 iPads to their high school students. He said due to the huge increase in numbers, they really needed a solution to make the student iPad program a success. So far with the Casper Suite, they have been able to share the iPad management workload across their teaching staff and have used it for crucial tasks such as tracking down lost devices.

Managing a massive Mac environment, Evan's team of six administrators is able to take it all on with the Casper Suite. While they secure their Apple devices rather tightly, they're able to utilize Self Service to keep end users happy by giving them access to common software on-demand. Find out how Evan's team uses the Casper Suite to manage 17,000+ Macs at 85 sites, despite recently losing over half of their IT staff.

Join us for a look inside the IT world at JAMF Software and learn about how we use the Casper Suite for our own unique approach to management. We'll discuss our new-hire onboarding process, the use of Self Service for both OS X and iOS, the JAMF Software eBook catalog, and all the other things we do to help the folks at JAMF Software work productively. Join us if you're curious to see how we can still use the Casper Suite to manage those unmanageable JAMFs.

At the Montclair Kimberley Academy, their technology program is not unlike many other K-12 organizations today: a one-to-one environment where students receive a personal laptop they use at school, home, and everywhere in-between. It's their management approach, however, that is incredibly unique: every student from grades 4-12 is an administrator on their laptop. While many IT administrators would be frightened at the thought of this, Damien explains how his organization is able conquer the challenges that come with allowing end users to be administrators and—in the process—teach them ethics and responsibility through this great privilege. Using the Casper Suite, Damien and his IT team are able provide powerful management for their students' Apple devices, while instilling in them the value of using technology wisely in their everyday lives.

The release of OS X Mountain Lion presents IT administrators with new possibilities for bringing client machines up to date, ranging from silent installs to end user-initiated upgrades. In this session, we will consider the various deployment options and evaluate the pros and cons of each. We will also hunt down some new features and considerations that are presented in v10.8. If an OS X Mountain Lion deployment is nearing your organization's territory, join Matt and Kyle for a roaring-good session.

This session will focus on Axel Springer's implementation as they used the Casper Suite to transfer thousands of Windows end users to the Mac platform. Jens will walk us through Axel Springer's environment and talk about why they chose the Casper Suite. We will discuss the first steps they took as their project was getting started, their back-end infrastructure, and how Axel Springer is leveraging the Casper Suite API.