This lesson we're going to talk about Apple Configurator, Apple Configurator, it's been around for
a number of years and it is a tool that Apple has created to manage large numbers of iOS devices, namely
iPads and small business, large business, enterprise and education markets.
And I'm just going to kind of tool around in the interface first to kind of give you guys an idea of
how this works.
First of all, just start with this main screen here.
I have one iPad plugged in to my Mac here.
You can probably hook up a number of iPads directly with the USB hub.
I know people who have had on board a large number of iPads on a regular basis will invest in either
an external chassis or they'll use an older Mac pro that had PCI card slots in it and even purchase
powered USB PCI cards put in and allow them to hook up eight, 10, 15 or more iPads to a single machine.
If you've got a very large operation, Apple provides some settings in Apple configurator and features
and I'll show those in a minute that will allow you to share configurations with across multiple Macs
so that you can really make the same setting changes and deploy the devices with the same information
across multiple different Macs.
But for today's purposes, we're just going to focus on one test, the iPad and the device here that
I'm running this on on my Mac.
So Apple configurator, a couple of quick things from the interface perspective.
We have the tabs across the top here for all devices supervised, unsupervised and recovery.
And this basically are just groups or smart groups that will take your list of iPads here and separate
them out into different categories.
So let me talk about recovery.
Obviously, that's that's probably, you know, on a devices in recovery mode that are going to show
up there.
Right.
But then we've got all devices.
That's also self-explanatory.
But what is supervised versus unsupervised?
So unsupervised is the default iOS operating system, meaning that they haven't been on boarded into
a mobile device management solution.
And even if they are even if they've been managed with Apple Configurator, they're not necessarily
in a supervised state unless you enroll them to be supervised.
And we'll get into supervised and unsupervised a bit more later.
Just know for right now that supervised devices have a more granular control over a lot of the settings
and unsupervised is basically the default operating system with the default restrictions and capabilities
there.
Up here, we've got the view button here, you can also changes to a list, so if you do this, you
have a little bit more information here other than the collection view.
So we go in the list.
We have things like the version of the operating system that's on here, the exact model capacity,
if it's supervised or not.
We'll talk about organization name here in a minute and then you know what it's plugged into and things
like that.
So that gives us a little bit more information.
And of course, you can sort these as well by any one of these items or by clicking on it.
If I just want to look at all of my sixty four gig devices, I can hit that.
So we'll just go back to the vault by name and I'm just going to change it back to collection.
I'm really only dealing with one iPad.
You can see my iPad is basically at the yellow screen.
I have not set it up.
It's basically ready for me to hand to a user basically like it's right out of the box.
So let's go up here and take a look at a couple other things under the Apple configurator menu.
First thing I want to do is go to preferences.
So in preferences, you've got some options here if you're onboarding a number of iPads and you want
to start hearing little sounds, which maybe you're bouncing between a couple of different Macs when
some are done, you can definitely set that up.
Same thing with warnings.
The organization Peace and the Server Peace, I'll talk about those here really quick.
So an organization.
Is basically the contact info that gets shown on the device when you have a supervised device.
So this would be something like a school that may want to brand their devices so that if someone goes
into the settings, it'll actually say the name of the school, a phone number, the address of the
school.
If they say the iPad was lost by a student that was found and somebody wanted to send it back, hopefully
it has that kind of information.
And I will tell you that it warns you around the screen, too.
But once you have set up an organization and supervise the device, you can't easily change this organization
information without erasing the device again.
So one of the things you want to make sure you do is spend a couple of minutes just thinking about what
you want your organization name to be and the contact information you want on here.
Probably not your personal cell phone number.
Right?
So think about that.
And then this is going to be the same thing.
You probably you've got multiple Macs and maybe a larger team that are onboarding all of these iPads
across all those Macs, probably going to want to export this organization identity and provide it to
others, too, so that you've got a consistent label, consistent identity for your organization across
all of your divisively.
So I'll go ahead and hit next here.
So the first thing I want to know is to sign into the device enrollment program.
We're actually going to talk about the device and roll the program later.
So I'm going to skip this.
And then I'm going to go ahead and just create my organization, so I'm just going to do my company
and I'll just do my.
Oh, no, here.
All right, so I've gone ahead and put it in my address.
And so I was going to ask me about a supervision identity and what we're going to do in this case,
because I haven't set up a supervision identity yet, I'm going to create a new one.
But this would also be a spot where I could choose an existing supervision identity.
So after I'm done with this set up, I'll export the supervision identity and then a subsequent Mac
would want to choose an existing one.
And that way you've got the same supervision identity consistent across all of your onboarding, Max,
and all of your iPads and iOS devices that you're onboarding into supervision.
So we'll go ahead and generate new.
Authenticate.
And here we go.
So here's our information, here's our organization, and I can go ahead and export the supervision
identity here if you want to actually show it.
And it created a certificate for me called my company and has all the information in here.
So this will allow me to export the organization your password protected.
And then you can just save it to your desktop.
And then you can also do the same thing with export supervision, identity, and it's a P 12.
It's a certificate file.
Same deal, same to the desktop.
And.
Put a password on here.
And both of those have been saved.
That's how I can share those with other markets and set up Apple configurator on those Macs as well,
so that we are all using the same organization.
We're all using the same supervision.
All right, the next thing I'm going to talk about real quick is servers, so we're going to come back
to this later.
But I do want to point this out.
This is where you would be able to put an MBM server in the mobile device management server.
And so at a later date, we're going to talk a little bit more about MDM.
And in those lessons, we'll get into the server option.
But that's where you would set it.
And while I'm in the preferences, I thought I would mention it.
You can tag items just like you can in full with folders in the finder and files and the finder.
So you can go in here and have some of these just by default.
You can change the names, you know, if you wanted to put an actual reason behind it, like maybe it's,
you know, accounting department and H.R. or something like that, however you want to do it, you're
going to add more of these tags.
So tags are there to just help you categorize different devices as you set them up.
You may use them, may not, but that's what they're for.
And then this gives you a list of all your backups.
So there's an option in the interface where you can go in and create a backup of particular devices.
You may want to use this to keep track of all the device backups you have, whether they're encrypted
and when the date the device backup was made.
And so we'll close out of that.
That's our preferences.
So just go ahead and click on this sample I've had that I have here.
And when I do that, I can see obviously I have my option here to tag and I've got my option here to
back up and it's going to start back.
And so I'm actually going to cancel the backup because I don't want a backup of this brand new device
out of the box, although there might be a reason why I would.
But that's where you do the backup here.
Update we'll get into a little bit later.
That's how you update your devices to the latest operating system and we'll talk about prepare text
as well where we go through and prepare the device for management.
Over here, we have blueprints and I'll talk about that more as well, that's so you can create a basically
a recipe of how you want your iPads set up and you can basically on board your device, choose a blueprint
and let it rip and it'll do all of the set up for you, relatively automated.
Then the add button is where you can add apps, documents and additional profiles as well if you're
not using blueprint's profiles are probably very helpful there.
If you are using blueprint's will show how you can basically put in all of your different profiles in
order that you want them applied.
And blue print will take care of that.
You can sign in with an Apple ID here as well for your apps and books, and then you have your different
actions here as well that are basically similar to the things across the top bar.
Finally, the search bar is obviously a place where you can search specific iPads if you had more than
one connected to your machine or have had a record of it.
So that's the basic interface of Apple configurator to pretty straightforward.
The next lesson we're going to talk more about mobile configuration and how to start to set up your
devices with restrictions in other settings.