Plan out your Apple deployment
The following milestones help you follow a structured path from planning through implementation and full utilization. Assign a person to be directly responsible for the development of each element, and assign others who might help them. Determine when you want each step to be completed. Some of these steps can be done concurrently.
Sign up for Apple School Manager Sign up for Apple School Manager to begin working on the Apple deployment workflows you’ll use to deploy Apple devices in your district. See Sign up for Apple School Manager.
Prepare your network for deployment of Apple devices Ensure all the needed ports and URLs are open on the networks that are used for deploying and managing your devices.
A robust wireless network infrastructure is crucial to the success of a mobile device deployment. A wireless network needs to be designed for both coverage and capacity, with particular care taken in regard to access point placement, power levels, and channel selection. See Prepare your network for deployment of Apple devices.
To provide equal access for remote learners without reliable home internet access, use cellular technology to help students continue to learn from anywhere.
Select a device management service to deploy and manage your Apple devices Ensure the service you choose supports the rollout type you are choosing and the types of scoping you’d like to use. For example, in a 1:1 model you may want to scope to roster data coming out of Apple School Manager. Make sure your service supports that feature if you want it. See Intro to device management services.
Determine how internet content will be filtered Use an existing internet filtering solution or make use of any related tools built into the device management service you choose. See Best practices for content filtering.
Decide if you need an Apple content caching server When an Apple device requests content for the first time, the Content Caching service downloads the data from the internet and streams it directly to the device. When subsequent Apple devices request the same data, it’s served directly from the Content Caching service without consuming additional bandwidth. Because the local network is normally much faster than the internet, the second device (and all subsequent devices) will download updates much more quickly. See Intro to content caching in Apple Platform Deployment.
Ensure test devices are available Make sure to have at least two of each device type available during the testing phase prior to a full rollout.
Agree expectations for deployment Decide as a team what the end user experience should feel like on day one. For example, will all apps be installed when a user signs in to a device for the first time? Will the apps be assigned to devices or to users?