Background:We've worked with Google and it's partners in the past with shipments of Chromebooks. We decided that we can do our own "white glove" service because we have it down. So with our latest shipment of 2,500 Dell Chromebooks our plan was to take advantage of auto enrollment, auto filling of usernames and auto placement of Chromebooks in their OUs. This blew up in our face because those were all now not possible. I won't go into it but I blogged about it here.
(Part of the issue was that we used to get the device serial numbers ingested into our console before enrollment so some of the features worked. This was only possible because we bought from Google and our vendors worked with Google in a small pilot. The pilot didn't go so well and Google doesn't directly sell devices anymore.)
Since then we received our shipment and it's been a ton more work than it should be. If those features were available it would have honestly saved hours and hours of work. This provoked my frustrated post on the Chromebook EDU Google+ Community.
However, good..no, great news...those features are coming back. And like I said, coming for the first time to many (most?) districts because they never had these features before.
I've heard from Google Support and I'll just address the items that I talked about in my post.
- No more auto populate of usernames - This will be back (it's an admin console improvement because it's not controlled by a policy). When you manually enroll a device into your domain for the first time, it will populate the user field with the username you used. If you were to wipe and re-enroll the device the username will not override the original one. I think there's good and bad to that. I'm wondering if you erase the current username in the user field and then wipe and re-enroll it, will it autofill? I think I remember this being the case in the past. Not sure about this though. It would be great if that was the case.
- No more auto placement of devices in OUs - A user policy is being created that will solve this. To get this to work on devices that are not yet in the console (not enrolled yet) they had to tie it to users enrolling. When this launches, you'll be able to enable certain users to automatically move devices into their OU when they enroll them. This will work with new devices or devices that are in a pending state. I'm wondering how giving "certain users" this ability will look and work.
- No more auto enrollment (have to do the 3 key stroke) - This isn't coming back, it looks like we're still going to have to do the 3 key stroke thing. If you bought directly from Google they ingested the serial numbers into the console so auto enrollment worked. Google is no longer selling devices directly. There was also a small pilot being done with Google and it's partners where they'd send Google serial numbers but it sounds like that didn't work out. They sunset that idea and moved in another direction.
Google says they are trying to work towards more of a one touch solution for enrolling. I really hope so because automatic enrollment was awesome because it takes the variable of someone forgetting to hit the key stroke out of the picture. It also gives us the option to simply give the device to a kid and have them enroll! It also reduces devices from skipping enrollment when a department might buy a small amount and they are not told to do the keystroke..this will happen :( The more I think about this...the more I'm worrying. Sure, it works okay when we have a team enrolling them but what happens during the year when we don't have an entire crew working on them? - No more model field population - It sounds like this function never really worked 100% properly. Because I won't be able to explain it any better here is what Google said "The way the field currently works is that it looks into our hardware database to see what the device model name is as it was initially intended for devices purchased from Google (when we launched, customers bought devices directly from Google and not through our now well developed channel :). However, even for those customers that did buy from Google, the model name was not even relevant to the actual device model! It would say something like CrOS-Standard or CrOS-3G. Anyway, I found a way to extrapolate the model name correctly from the platform information the device passes up (e.g. if it says daisy in the platform info - then its a Samsung Chromebook, if it says stout - then its a Lenovo Thinkpad X131e, etc.)."
When are these updates coming?
In the next few weeks.
So, if you're planning on doing enrollment I would think about the timing. Also, be aware of the auto placement feature being implemented. I would imagine we will have to turn it on but it would be quite confusing if you all of sudden don't see devices in root but in other OUs.
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