Set Up a New or Reset District iPad

This article discusses how to bring a District iPad into service with a device setup. The usual cases are 1) it is a recently-reset District iPad (which you may have reset yourself), or it is a new District iPad, not yet set up for the first time. You are welcome to perform the setup yourself, or you can send the device to us, at your option. With just a couple of caveats, as discussed below, the process is pretty easy and should be reliable as well, even if we may need to make other management tweaks to the device after setup.

Background

The big purpose of getting the device setup right is to bring the device into service under Mobile Device Management (MDM) supervision. When you reset an Apple device that is already known to our MDM, or with a new device that is already known to our MDM, its setup should be mostly pre-configured for you, with most setup steps suppressed over what you'd see when setting up an equivalent personal device. And of course once under our MDM, we can do many things to support the iPad that make life easier for both of us. :-)

When a device is in "setup mode", whether new or post-device-reset, it is ready to go through activation (with the Apple mothership), enrollment (with the MDM server assigned it by Apple School Manager (ASM), and initial configuration (received from the MDM after enrollment).

NOTE: You do not have to be at a District location in order to do a device setup, but the below is (mostly) written with the assumption that you are.

Before Setup

New iPads

With new iPads, right out of the box without having been set up by Information Services already, the big thing is to make sure that our MDM knows to accept the device. Before setting up, please contact the Helpdesk and get us the following information about each device:

Device serial number (SN), usually both in text and barcode on the packaging, or on the back of the device itself
Borough Number (BN), usually on the back of the device itself in the form of a physical sticker, or sometimes etched/engraved along with the words "Kenai Peninsula Borough School District"
District Location (e.g., which school or department; "Kaleidoscope", "Nursing Services", etc.) at which the device will be used
If known, the intended user of the device, and any significant device cohorts that might imply custom sets of apps, configuration, restrictions, etc.

NOTE: If you have a large number of devices belonging to a single order, it may be practical to use a barcode scanner to create a simple table or spreadsheet to map each device SN to its corresponding BN. Be aware that some of the Apple barcodes can scan with a prefix character (e.g., there will be an "S" before each actual serial number), and if you're in any doubt, just scan it as it is, and we'll usually be able to figure it out. Alternatively, you might be able to pull the bulk information straight out of the inventory system, if you have access, or as a last resort you could send us a clear scan of the warehouse receiving paperwork (the warehouse should record the BN with each SN as part of their tagging process, but it is often handwritten). Feel free to give us a call with any questions on this; it helps us a lot to get it right the first time, and we're happy to work with you to do that!

Recently-reset iPads

If you are setting up a District device you just reset yourself, you may already have let us know of any MDM updates or changes during the prepare for reset stage. If so, thank you! and you don't need to do it again here.

If for some reason you are setting up an iPad you didn't reset yourself, please review the "Before Reset" section of Reset a District iPad, and let us know if you suspect or anticipate any MDM changes we should apply before your setup.

Set Up the New or Recently-Reset District Device

For a device in setup mode, wake it up with its Home button (if necessary), and begin the setup wizard, which should start with the choice of language.

Choose Language, presumably US English.
Choose Country, presumably United States.
If you get an option to "Quick Start", please bypass it by tapping Set Up Manually down at bottom.
At "Choose a Wi-Fi Network", if you are within the District's network range, choose KPBSD-Guest. (For more about why we do this, see here.) If you're not at a District location, you can just connect to any Internet-ready network. Once it connects to the chosen network, you might need to tap a Next button at upper right, or you might not. The screen should advance to a temporary page telling you that the device is undergoing activation with Apple, and then it should land on the "Remote Management" screen, indicating that the activation process told the device that it belongs to KPBSD, and that it needs to enroll with our MDM server, Jamf School. This is where we want to be, and if you get any other response than landing at "Remote Management", please check the below "If Things Go Wrong" section.
At "Remote Management", tap the Next button. At this point the device should check in with our MDM server and receive its mobile management configuration. After this, most devices will go straight to the "Location Services" step of iPad setup (we pre-suppress most of the setup steps to keep things as simple as possible), but a few devices may ask you to authenticate your employee or student number for enrollment purposes. If you see any other steps in the setup process than these two, please check out the "If Things Go Wrong" section below.
At the "Location Services" step, please Enable Location Services. After this step, most devices will either present a "Welcome to iPad" screen or go straight to the device's first Home screen. (Different versions of iOS can differ significantly at this point, and your device may have received custom configuration profiles and/or app install commands, but at this point you've completed the setup wizard and have but one more step to take before you're done.)
The final step is to confirm that you can now connect to the preferred wireless network, KPBSD-ManagedDevices, without being challenged for a password, and to affirmatively "forget" the KPBSD-Guest network that you used temporarily, to do the setup and enrollment. (For details, see the "Confirm KPBSD-ManagedDevices" and "Forget KPBSD-Guest" sections of the article Connect a District iOS Device to District Wireless.)

If everything goes well, it won't be too long after you successfully connect to KPBSD-ManagedDevices, that you should see your on-demand resources app, Jamf School Student, automatically install itself. (Depending on other pre-defined configurations for your device, you may also see other apps install automatically as well.) You should also see two auto-install webclips: KPBSD iPad, which links to an entry point for info about your District iPad, and Azure Webclip, which allows you to associate your device with your Active Directory user ID.

If Things Go Wrong

First of all, if things go wrong somehow, you are always welcome to contact the Helpdesk; we may be able to help you get sorted out with a quick phone call. (A lot of this stuff takes much longer to write and read than to do, but we write it for the case where you might not be able to reach us. :-)

There are a few places in this process where things can go wrong, including:

Device can't connect to KPBSD-Guest network. In theory this shouldn't happen, but sometimes the Guest network seems...finicky. In such a case you can try a different network (see Choose the Right District Wireless Network for Your Device for details about available District networks), or you can use a non-District network or even a temporary hotspot from your phone, if you're in a pinch. And of course you can give us a call.
You wind up looking at an unfamiliar step screen during setup. If your device is not currently under District management and/or supervision (not too common, but it does happen), we may need to update your device's MDM assignment data and have you try again. If you wind up at a setup screen that looks like it's part of the large sequence of steps you'd go through for a personally-bought iPad or iPhone (e.g., Wallet, Apple Pay, Apple ID, Transfer Data, etc.), it usually means that we need to fix your device's assignments to Jamf School--and the solution is for you to give us a call.
You wind up in Activation Lock. This dreaded condition means that the device has an active iCloud (Apple ID) login, and the Find My iPad feature is turned on, and the device was reset without signing out of the Apple ID as per our recommendation. At this point, depending on the age of the device, the version of iOS it runs, the MDM status, the Apple ID involved, and how the device was previously enrolled, getting past this problem may be as easy as keying in the password on the Activation Lock screen (if you know it, key it in and you should move past this step immediately), or it may involve a weeks-long, deliberately aggravating process with Apple to re-establish to Apple's satisfaction that the device is indeed ours. (There are also in-between states, with a few different administrative tricks we may try depending on all the above particulars.) If you wind up in this state, please do give us a call and we'll discuss what we can do.
Your setup times out before completing. This happens sometimes because either your network is having problems, or because Apple's activation servers are temporarily unavailable, or because our Jamf School server is temporarily unavailable. Usually the device will tell you what the problem is--usually--and if you're in the middle of a setup, you can certainly just put the device aside for a while and re-attempt it later. Most network problems are temporary, and it's not common to see the Apple or Jamf servers down for more than a few hours at at time. Certainly if you do run into a persistent problem being unable to complete a setup once started, please give us a call.
You cannot connect to KPBSD-ManagedDevices shortly after setup is completed. This shouldn't happen, but sometimes it does, and the solution here is to give us a call if you cannot join the ManagedDevices network within, say, an hour of your setup's completion. We may ask you to provide some information out of the Settings app in this case.