Silently Install iOS Apps with Meraki to an iPad Cart

A bit of background for this post.  I work for a quickly growing school district on a team that manages around 4000 Macs, iPads and Chromebook.  We have approximately 1200 iPads that are in carts for each grade level to use.  We needed a method to silently push the apps to each of the carts.  The method we chose was to create a different Apple ID for each cart at each school and use Apple's VPP Managed Distribution.

NOTE:  You will need to invite the user accounts via VPP before proceeding.  Follow my previous post here for instructions.

1. Purchase the paid or free apps via the Apple VPP website.
2. Go to meraki.com and login to your Systems Manager dashboard.
3. Go to MDM > VPP
4. Click the Licensed Applications tab if it isn’t already selected.
5. Check the name of the app you want to assign to an Apple ID.

NOTE:  If the app you are looking to assign is listed, but has been purchased from the Apple VPP website, you may need to sync the Apple API.  Click the Force sync now button in the upper right of the window.

1. Check the box next to the user(s) (Apple IDs) you want to assign the app to.
2. Click Grant license to user(s)

Now that the license has been granted, we need to assign the app to the devices.

1. Go to MDM > Apps
2. Click + Add new > iOS App
3. Search for the app.
4. Click Add next to the app to be assigned.
5. Set the scope to select which devices should receive the app.
6. Click Save

OPTIONAL:  We usually check the box next to Remove with MDM.  This way if a user removes the management profile, the apps will also be removed.

Problems Updating IBM POS to Windows 7

Upon finding out that we can now install our own Food Service Point of Sale software we decided to update some of our old IBM POS 4846-545 from Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 to Windows 7.  We wanted to finish this sooner than later due to the end of Windows XP support as well as XP becoming a bit sluggish on this hardware.  An easy enough task, however, the Windows 7 installer would hang after the Windows 7 splash screen.

Knowing that these systems were outdated by a couple of years when we purchased them, I assumed there was likely a BIOS update available from IBM to fix the problem.  Sure enough, I found a BIOS update (version X6KT190) that had been released on 1-5-2011.  Our POS systems were still running X6KT170 which had been released in 2008.

Thankfully, there is an executable version of the BIOS update that can be started from within Windows, saving the need to dig out the old USB floppy drive.

After updating the BIOS, the Windows 7 Setup screen was displayed and we were able to install Windows 7 without any problem.  All of the drivers also had Windows 7 support.

IBM POS 4846-545 BIOS