How Taiwan deployed 400,000 iPads in just a few weeks
Large schooling deployments are among the many most difficult issues IT admins have to unravel. So, simply how did they deploy 400,000 iPads in Taiwan?
Is it doable to deploy lots of of 1000’s of iPads throughout a number of areas to an enormous group of individuals with totally different talent ranges? Absolutely. That’s what’s occurred in Taiwan, the place the Ministry of Education invested hundreds of thousands to place tens of 1000’s of tablets into the Okay-12 schooling sector.
Smart schooling to make children smarter
Taiwan needs to supply its kids world-class digital lecture rooms. That’s why it not too long ago moved to increase pill provision to elementary and junior colleges, in addition to Okay-12. (It already provides high-speed web entry and sensible lecture rooms.)
But this isn’t actually an schooling story. It’s a lesson in methods to effectively deal with a posh multi-platform deployment at scale. Anyone who has delivered large-scale rollouts throughout any type of enterprise is aware of how advanced they are often.
Planning is important to getting every part proper. This extends to methods to use the gadgets you propose to deploy, after all, but in addition to the way in which they will be used.
Does each system must be dealt with and setup manually by IT, or can distant administration instruments scale back the workload? What about bandwidth? Can IT preserve broadband QoS ranges when dealing with so many gadgets in such a compressed time? What about distribution? What’s the method to tech help? What about system administration?
This was the substance of an attention-grabbing case research shared on the Jamf JNUC occasion this week.
Managing blended platforms
Taiwan’s schooling ministry wished a strategy to deal with Chrome, Windows, and iOS tools. It had tried working with a UEM supplier to deal with these, however by the point the brand new deployment was deliberate it determined to construct its personal administration system.
To help the hassle, the platform-focused MDM distributors it selected needed to provide APIs that could possibly be exploited by its personal portal. It selected to work with Apple and Jamf.
Jamf might combine with the ministry’s personal UEM as a result of it makes use of the Restful API, which makes use of business customary JSON and XML information. It additionally supplied SAML 2.0 for authentication and SSO. (The ministry wished to make use of its personal ID supplier.)
Additional challenges included the necessity to help all these gadgets, to handle them once they’re taken dwelling, to trace pupil conduct and to make sure the tablets couldn’t be used to entry improper content material. All of this was doable with the chosen MDM.
The IT departments additionally wished to have the ability to consolidate the huge stock right into a single database.
Given the selection between platforms, 80% of customers selected Apple’s gadgets. Jamf and Apple labored collectively to unravel a number of the challenges of the deployment.
Solving advanced issues, one customary at a time
When the venture started, Taiwan confronted a number of further challenges, not least the truth that not each instructor was aware of the expertise being put in place. Winnie Wang, Jamf Senior Sales Manager, APAC, defined how Apple and Jamf plugged the data hole.
Working collectively, they educated 3,000 lecturers in the usage of the iPads and digital schooling assets. To obtain this, they hosted greater than 100 coaching periods in three months — and after simply two months, had deployed 400,000 iPads throughout Taiwan.
Knowledge could also be energy, however expertise by itself doesn’t resolve something. Taiwan has additionally invested in high-quality digital instructing supplies and has created an E-Learning gateway. It can be value noting that Taiwan’s E-learning system depends on massive knowledge to trace pupil progress and information them towards higher instructional attainment.
With a deployment problem so big, how did Jamf and Apple deal with it?
Deploying 10,000 iPads a day
Quite nicely, it appears. Having thought-about the wants of the venture 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 capable of deploy the Apple tablets at a median fee of 10,000 iPads a day. The course of passed off throughout eight weeks, throughout which 400,000 iPads had been put in place at colleges throughout the nation.
In different phrases, with somewhat thought and group, it is doable to arrange extraordinarily large-scale expertise deployments in restricted time. So, when your IT division tells you one thing can’t be completed, maybe it’s time to encourage them to suppose totally different in regards to the issues they face?
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