Leading up to the launch

150 iPads "cluttering" up my office

This post is retrospective after the exciting launch day - there has been huge amount to learn as well as huge amounts to do in the last few weeks since I was looking at the large pile of boxes containing iPads, cases and other paraphernalia in my university office a few weeks ago.

It did not help that the iPads arrived the day before I was off on summer vacation and the university closed down for the summer so it was nearly the end of August before we were able to get going with the configuration and setting up of the devices we only had about 3 weeks to get 150 devices ready for the students who would be arriving on the 13th - and we were also desperate to keep the whole thing quiet so it would be a surprise for the students.

The first thing it that it takes a long time just to get 150 devices out of the packing boxes and strip off the protective cellophane - then get the cover out of its own packing. Think of the exciting 10 mins it takes to do one of your own, and then multiply this by 150. The excitement starts to die off buy about number 10 ... and by number 100 you are almost sick of the sight of them; however, once all 150 were laid out on the table it is rather exciting again.

Then we had to label each device twice with an inventory code provided by the university - tagged to the serial number of the device - another whole day's work. Setting up Configurator© with some expert help was not too bad and loading the "free" apps onto the master machine was pretty easy getting the paid apps was more complicated as the university was pretty protective of its  credit card (not unreasonably). We finally managed to do this but then found that we has problems as our wireless network (protected) would not let us validate all the machines in order to install the apps - so we had to log onto each machine separately!

Finally we are using the Meraki© mobile device management system and we found that this did not work easily with the paid apps so we had to install these "by hand" from the MacBook we are using as the master machine - another pretty mammoth task.

Alongside all of this has been setting up the mechanisms for the research project - getting some baseline data and sorting out a core research question.

We are sure that we have not discovered easier ways to do this - but closed Wifi and university systems do not seem to be set up for this kind of deployment - things to think about if we were to look at bigger deployments in the future.

Still it all (more or less happened) and we were ready to hand out the devices to the students on the 13th ... maybe Friday the 13th wasn't the most auspicious of dates to choose!