Dive Brief:

• Apple on Wednesday released improvements to iOS' large-scale deployment tools for those in education and enterprise, a move meant to make such deployments more appealing to those purchasing and maintaining the devices.
• Among the changes are tweaks to the Device Enrollment Program, Volume Purchase Program, and Apple ID for Students, as well as a new iOS Security Document, overview document cheat sheet, deployment technical reference guide, and Device Enrollment Program guide.
• School and district IT administrators now also have Mobile Device Management hands-free configuration support, which allows deployed devices to come pre-configured with all security and configuration choices based on a profile.

Dive Insight:

This news should come as a relief to IT professionals in schools or districts with massive iPad deployments. Hopefully, the adjustments can help prevent issues like those experienced by the Los Angeles Unified School District, where some students were able to sidestep security settings. That problem, in particular, shouldn't surface again thanks to the option for zero-touch configuration, which can lock the preloaded security profiles to devices and prevent their removal by users.