LSE’s iRoam laptop service lets students borrow Apple laptops from the library
The Apple environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has grown from a handful of unsupported Macs to more than 1,000 managed Apple devices over the last couple of years. Shifting to more automated provisioning of Apple devices has allowed the British university to try new things – including offering loaner laptops to students through a MacBook “vending machine” in the library.
Yannis Lagogiannis is responsible for the Apple enterprise infrastructure, deployment and support strategy at LSE, which has 9,600 students, 3,300 staff members, 25 academic departments, and dozens of research centers. When Lagogiannis started working at the Microsoft Windows-centric school, there was no system in place for keeping track of Apple devices.
“We knew we had a lot of Apple devices in the wild,” said Lagogiannis, Apple systems specialist at LSE. Lagogiannis also knew that heavy-handed efforts to take control of those devices would be a mistake.
“Coming into an environment and being asked to set up a managed environment – ‘managed’ is a very tricky word,” said Lagogiannis, who shared his experience at JAMF Software’s user conference in Minneapolis. “These researchers see their environment as their own domain. They bring in the money for the research centers, and they buy the hardware. Simply going to someone and saying, ‘forget about what you’ve been doing so far. This is how you do it.’ It wouldn’t work that way.”
“We decided to adopt a non-intrusive management model,” Lagogiannis said.
LSE uses JAMF’s Casper suite, an enterprise management platform for Mac OS X computers and iOS mobile devices, together with Apple’s Device Enrollment Program (DEP), to set up and provision new devices. With the Casper Suite, IT admins can define enrollment settings and configuration profiles for users before the devices are deployed. Once a user receives a device and activates it, the device is automatically enrolled with the Casper Suite without IT intervention, and the configurations are applied.
“For quite a long time, buying a computer or a device meant two or three weeks. You order it, you wait for it to come, it has to be set up, you get an email, you have to make an appointment, and then you go and you sit with the person for half an hour,” Lagogiannis said.
LSE’s goal was to streamline and automate the provisioning process. “The whole point of having a very sophisticated tool like the [JAMF Software Server (JSS)], and DEP in the background, is to skip quite a lot of these steps,” Lagogiannis said.
LSE’s JSS environment is segmented using Sites, which allows the IT team to set different policies for groups or departments with distinctive needs. Nearly all applications are delivered via self-service with a few exceptions, including Microsoft Office, Sophos security software, and Java. IT’s management efforts are related primarily to patching, security and compliance, Lagogiannis said.
The “low-touch” approach is focused more on providing services to the user and less on managing the hardware, Lagogiannis said. “We were fairly bold in saying we were going to try to not image anything. And we haven’t for two years,” he said. “We decided to say no to imaging, yes to [user] enrollment.”
LSA counts a number of benefits so far. Using Casper Suite and DEP to provision devices gives IT the ability to audit and manage its iOS estate more accurately. “We wanted to know where our devices were,” Lagogiannis said. It also has reduced the time it takes for a device to reach the user.
When a device is purchased and delivered to the school, the user picks it up and can activate the device at his or her convenience. It’s empowering for users — being able to activate devices on their own has decreased the tendency for users to want to wipe their devices as soon as they get them from IT, Lagogiannis said. In addition, users seem to enjoy the unboxing experience.
On the flip side, if a user wants IT’s help setting up a device, IT is there to help. “The point of automating things is not to never see your users again,” Lagogiannis said. The feedback IT has received so far shows that some users prefer to confirm with IT that the setup is correct. “Inevitably, this is a side effect of automation. People feel a bit isolated, on their own,” Lagogiannis said. “That’s something I thought we should address.”
LSE’s Casper-led management platform also provides a framework for iRoam, a MacBook Air “vending machine” in the school’s library building. Contained in a secure cabinet, the MacBooks are essentially treated like books, available for students to borrow for four hours at a time. Students scan their ID cards to remove devices from the self-service cabinet, and then log in over wi-fi for access to JSS-managed resources including shared drives, applications, virtual desktops and printers.
On logout, the user profile is cleared. When a device is being returned, the borrower must reconnect the power adapter in order for the cabinet door to lock. Once the battery is adequately charged, the MacBook is again made available for borrowing.
“We started the pilot with about 36 MacBooks last year. We’re now over 100, and we get requests for more every day,” Lagogiannis said.
The iRoam program is inspiring LSE to consider other opportunities to forego the traditional, static computer lab and instead provide access to computing resources in more open, flexible study areas.
“Especially for a university that is planted in the middle of London, which is one of the most expensive areas to build in the world, space is precious,” Lagogiannis said. MacBook cabinets take up much less space than dedicated computer labs, and they’re easier to expand.
Looking ahead, LSE plans to deploy more cabinets in more areas and expand the lending policies so students could potentially borrow a device in one building and return it in another building.
