Apple School Manager account management overview

Apple School Manager is a service for schools that allows IT departments at educational institutions to manage school devices and deploy apps to these devices. With Apple School Manager, you create and assign roles to students and staff that define the permissions and restrictions applied to groups of users. Apple School Manager uses mobile device management (MDM) solutions, such as Ivanti EPMM, to manage Apple School Manager devices.

Ivanti EPMM uses the following to manage your Apple School Manager devices:

An Apple Device Enrollment account, to more easily purchase and enroll devices in bulk
A Apple License account, to manage and distribute apps to teacher and student devices with a device-based license

In Ivanti EPMM's user interface, the term "Apple Education" is used. "Apple School Manager portal" refers to the Apple portal (school.apple.com.)

Using Apple Device Enrollment, you can purchase and enroll devices in bulk. You then create an Apple School Manager account to which you assign your devices. Apple School Manager synchronizes with supported third-party vendor Student Information Systems (SIS) to retrieve student, teacher, and class data. Finally, you connect Apple School Manager to Ivanti EPMM to manage school devices and use the Apple Licenses to distribute apps to teachers and students alike (such as the Apple Classroom app for teachers only, and other apps you may wish to deploy to student devices).

You can only use one Apple School Manager account in Ivanti EPMM.

For more information about using Apple School Manager, refer to the following documents from Apple (an Apple login is required):

Apple School Manager managed entities

The entities you manage in an Apple School Manager account include:

Students and teachers -You can add students to your Apple School Manager account using your Student Information System (SIS). You can also manually add students, teachers, and classes to your Apple School Manager account.

Apple School Manager does not synchronize user roles with Ivanti EPMM, meaning students and teachers can only be distinguished by context, such as the name of the user teaching a class.
Class - A class requires students and teachers at minimum.
Courses - A unit of study associated with students and teachers. You can only view courses in Ivanti EPMM after synchronizing with Apple School Manager servers.
Locations - You can add one location and multiple sub-locations to your Apple School Manager account. You can only view locations in Ivanti EPMM after synchronizing with Apple School Manager servers.
Devices - When using Apple School Manager, Ivanti EPMM supports supervised iPad devices running iOS 9.3 through the most recently released version of iOS or supported newer versions.
Managed Apple ID. A managed Apple ID allows users to log in to a device and access services such as Apple School Manager, iCloud courses, and iTunes U courses. The Apple School Manager account controls the Managed Apple IDs associated with that account, enabling account administrators to reset passwords, set roles and permissions, and so on. A Managed Apple ID restricts certain services such as the user’s ability to make purchases on the Apps, iBooks, and iTunes stores. When you add users to your Apple School Manager account, a Managed Apple ID is created at the time of account creation.

Apple School Manager device requirements

Devices you manage with Apple School Manager must:

Be supervised
Run iOS 9.3 through the most recently released version of iOS or supported newer versions

Ivanti recommends using Apple Device Enrollment devices with Apple School Manager for ease of management, and beginning with fresh devices. If you are re-purposing a device, Ivanti recommends you wipe and then retire the device before using it with Apple School Manager.

The Classroom app

Classroom is an iPad app that allows teachers to share documents and learning modules with students, as well as manage student devices. Teachers can use Classroom to launch apps or a textbook on student iPad devices and share or project documents or work.

You can use Ivanti EPMM to distribute the Classroom app to teacher devices and configure whether students can control whether teachers can view their screens.

For more information about Classroom, see the following Apple links (an Apple login is required):

Getting Started with Classroom
Classroom Help

Apple School Manager setup with Ivanti EPMM: main steps

The main steps required to set up Apple School Manager with Ivanti EPMM are as follows: