IPad – Need to re-enroll 200-250 iPads worldwide, help

ipadmobile-device-managementprofile-managerserver.app

Due to a bug with postgresql when updating Server.app to 3.2.2 I now have to re-enroll almost 250 iPads worldwide manually. These are all supervised and "enrolled" with the old server setup.

Traveling around the world to 200+ locations with a Mac is not an option, so the best solution seems to be to open Safari on each device, go to the server / mydevices page and enroll them manually. Is this even possible with an already enrolled and supervised device? Most of these devices are not online, and it'll be fairly random as to when they're enrolled to the server and they'll probably be disconnected shortly afterwards, so what I really need is some way of predefining which group these devices belong to as they all have a different app that needs to be installed. I do not have the list of serial numbers to know which belongs to which group, but the name of the device should tell me which group it should go into.

So… What I need is either:
1. Being able to make a placeholder for each device based only on the name of the device (is this possible?)
2. Being able to filter a device into a group automatically on enrollment based on the name (name contains string)
3. Putting a device into a group based on the user account that was used to enroll it with

I'm pretty confident that option 2 is not possible, not sure if there's a way to do option 1, but what about option 3?

The last option is for the users to log in to the MDM server interface after enrolling the device, and placing it in the right group. But as far as I can tell that means they'll get FULL access to all devices enrolled into the server, and the ability to change and remove groups. Is there any way to give them access to their own devices and groups without having access to them all?

Considering updating the server to Yosemite at the same time since I have to start from scratch either way.

EDIT: Oh heck… Can I even re-enroll these when they're supervised?

Best Answer

You can only have 1 MDM profile installed at a time, so it will not allow you to re-enroll the devices if they are already enrolled (even if the original server is now defunct)

I cannot recall if you can remove the MDM profile from a supervised device, but I believe that you can.

The easiest way would be to probably send a link that can be opened in safari to re-enroll the devices as you mentioned above. You can always take the profile and host it at a different URI so no user account is needed, therefore you wouldn't need to worry about access at all.

Hope this helps a little.

Mike