With more than 2,000 in attendance, and many more watching via livestream, Dean Hager, Jamf CEO, kicked off the 9th Jamf Nation User Conference from Minneapolis, MN.
Hager began by discussing Jamf’s humble beginnings and explained that from day one, the focus has always been to empower people with Apple. He added, “Just a few years ago, Jamf was a little Minneapolis start-up company. But you have made Jamf one of the fastest growing device management companies in the world. This growth has confused a lot of people. After all, isn’t the entire world migrating to a unified management system? Why would the one company that professes the importance of focusing on one ecosystem be growing at this rate?”
It’s about the user, the person. Hager explained that Apple sees the person like no other company… and Jamf sees the people. When Apple launches a new product, Jamf imagines the workflows. By embracing one-of-a-kind groundbreaking services like Apple School Manager and Apple Business Manager, Jamf is able to create workflows that empower all kinds of organizations to simply, yet powerfully, manage their Apple devices.
This focus on Apple has seen Jamf’s customer number exceed 18,000 while helping those organizations manage more than 11 million Apple devices.
What’s new with Jamf
Dave Alampi, Chief Marketing Officer, and Beth Tschida, VP of Software Engineering, joined Hager on stage to give an update on some of the latest features of Jamf Pro 10.
- Powerful reporting – With the new reports tab, IT admins will now have the ability to turn advanced searches into automatically delivered reports.
- Empowering a better onboarding experience – IT admins can now deploy configuration profiles to Supervised iOS and tvOS devices prior to Setup Assistant completing, a major step forward for seamless onboarding. When activated, this feature will keep the device in the Setup Assistant workflow until the assigned profiles finish installing, giving every user a smooth and consistent enrollment experience.
- Manage tvOS updates – Admins will now be able to remotely update the tvOS operation system.
- Support of Classroom app for macOS – Previously, teachers that wanted to leverage Apple’s Classroom app had to carry/use an iPad. With support for the Classroom app on macOS devices, teachers can now utilize a Mac to guide students in the classroom.
- Activation Lock enhancement – Previously, Jamf gave admins the ability to enable Activation Lock as part of PreStage Enrollment on Apple Business Manager / Apple School Manager devices. With the latest version of Jamf Pro, admins can manage Activation Lock outside of PreStage Enrollment entirely, meaning customers will not have to wipe and re-enroll devices in order to take advantage of Activation Lock.
Not already a Jamf customer, put these features to the test with a free trial.
But these exciting new features in Jamf Pro aren’t all Jamf announced. Tschida, a new Jamf employee herself, excitedly told the crowd about Jamf’s new program – Jamf Online Training. This training is accessible anywhere, anytime and is organized in bite-size modules. Learning series are based on capabilities and roles. “If you are a help desk technician you have different training needs than a system engineer. Now, if you prefer to go through all of the materials, or just some of them, they are all here á la carte giving you the ability to customize your learning experience,” Tschida said.
Open-source provisioning workflow for Mac@IBM program now available
IBM Chief Information Officer, Fletcher Previn, next took the stage and asked the audience, “When did it become OK to live like The Jetsons at home but The Flinstones at work?” His spot-on analogy highlighted how many consumers choose a modern device for personal use but are given “legacy” tools for work.
The launch of IBM’s employee choice program in June of 2015 was a monumental step in empowering employees with the tools that make them the most productive and creative, and giving them the modern device experience they crave. Today, Previn was proud to share the progress of IBM’s three-plus year initiative.
- 277,000 Apple devices deployed at IBM (supported by a total of 78 people)
- I34,000+ Mac
- 90,000+ iPhone
- 40,000+ iPad
“We’re deploying more Macs every month, but not requiring more help staff to support these users,” said Previn.
Before exiting the stage, Previn had one additional announcement that received a raucous ovation from the JNUC crowd: IBM has open sourced its provisioning workflow for their Mac@IBM program. Others can now take IBM’s lead and offer a Mac choice program to their employees with the help of an automated provisioning workflow for Mac.
Hager thanked Previn and told him that customers often come to Jamf with provisioning plans, saying that they want to follow in IBM’s footsteps. Hager went on to say, “For your team to contribute that code as open source to Jamf Nation community is greatly appreciated by all. Thank you.”
Orchard & Grove acquisition and new Jamf Connect product
Keeping on the topic of open source, Hager acknowledged Jamf’s recent acquisition of Orchard & Grove, a company known for NoMAD and for contributing open source to the Jamf Nation community. He welcomed Joel Rennich, Director of Jamf Connect, and Rachel Kjos, leader of Customer Success to the stage. Kjos excitedly welcomed Rennich to the Jamf family, turned to the audience and said, “We obviously saw a great opportunity to strengthen Jamf’s core products, but also DO RIGHT by THE THOUSANDS of Orchard & Grove customers that exist today. That is why we made the decision from the beginning to extend the Jamf Support that all of you know and love directly into this product. But we didn’t stop at Jamf Connect…. we also chose to offer free chat support for the open source version, still known as NoMAD.”
Kjos also announced Jamf is providing free chat support for its budding Marketplace integration community. The Jamf Marketplace has over 200 providers and is growing every day.
Rennich then announced how Jamf is going back to support Active Directory… but in the cloud with Azure Active Directory! He did a live demo of setting up Jamf Connect login as a Pre-Stage Enrollment package. Rennich said, “Since we already have the package uploaded to our Jamf instance, I can very quickly add this package to the Pre-stage Enrollment workflow. This uses the AwaitConfiguration MDM command and ensures that the package is installed before the loginwindow is shown.”
Exciting news from the Jamf Connect team – and with the mention of Azure, Dean came back on stage to welcome Microsoft’s Brad Anderson, Corporate VP of Enterprise Experiences and Management.
Mac authentication with Microsoft Azure Active Directory
With Jamf Pro, Jamf Connect and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), users can log into a new Mac with Microsoft Azure Active Directory credentials, eliminating the need to create and manage a local username and password on an end user’s Mac.
While you can consolidate macOS device inventory from Jamf in Intune today and enforce conditional access with remediation, the new Jamf and EMS integration will include:
Authentication: With Jamf Connect (available with Jamf Pro or independent of Jamf Pro) formerly NoMad premium solutions, users will be able to authenticate to their Mac with their Azure Active Directory credentials. This will simplify life for end users by enabling them to enter only one set of credentials to access their Mac and immediately use cloud-based services registered with Azure Active Directory (e.g., Microsoft Office 365). Account setup and synchronization with Azure Active Directory will happen automatically behind the scenes.
“As we think about the modern workplace, it’s about how you empower users to be productive and creative on the device of their choice,” said Anderson. “With Microsoft and Jamf, organizations can consolidate endpoint management and empower macOS users, as well as give them an experience that feels familiar across all of their devices.”
SAP leveraging Jamf to manage macOS, tvOS, and now, iOS devices
Andrina Kelly, User Experience Lead at Jamf, then came onstage to talk about how much Jamf values customer feedback and incorporates it into the product roadmap. When talking with one customer in particular, Kelly explained how it became very apparent that they too were thinking (and obsessing!) about their end user experience. “Last year, you heard the story of how SAP was empowering their end users with their Mac management project. Since then, SAP has been expanding their reach even further… this year, they’re not only able to talk to us about how they’re using Jamf to manage macOS and tvOS, but over the past year they’ve started using Jamf to manage iOS also.”
SAP VP of IT Services, Enterprise Mobility, Martin Lang, came on stage to talk about Apple@SAP, SAP’s Apple Center of Excellence team. SAP started this initiative as more and more employees requested to use Apple devices, resulting in over 17,000 Macs, 83,000 iOS devices and 170 Apple TVs currently being managed by Lang’s team. SAP is managing these devices together with Jamf Pro to create a native and integrated IT and user experience across all of its Apple devices.
“The only way to increase productivity at SAP is to increase the productivity of the people. With a growing number of SAP employees choosing Apple devices, SAP decided to reorganize its IT teams to create an Apple CoE team and chose Jamf because of its focus on the user experience,” Lang said.
And with that, JNUC 2018 is underway!
To keep up with all things JNUC, follow the #JNUC2018 hashtag and keep an eye on the Jamf blog for session recaps.
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