My Enterprise/Education iOS Wish List

Item number two on your list may be a reality sooner, rather than later. I heard some rumblings from an Apple engineer about how they were taking with the JAMF Casper devs on how to implement app installs without requiring an Apple ID sign-in. These are, of course, just rumblings, so take them with a grain of salt.

Item number 3 has been on my list for a long time, and I almost always bring it up when chatting with our Apple rep or Apple engineers. I've got an AppleScript for mass-creating users right now, but it's ugly, hacky, and breaks any time Apple changes the sign-up process.

Mr. Freimark, this site's admin, actually contacted me about it. I'd be happy to share, but as I confessed to Mr. Freimark, it is reeeaaallly hacky. It's mostly GUI scripting iTunes with a few little tricks sprinkled in. I wish I was doing some sort of magic behind the scenes with secret API calls and whatnot, but alas, it is not so.

Nevertheless, after I can scrape out some time to clean it up, fix some of the stuff that broke when Apple changed the security question stuff, make it a bit more organization agnostic, and comment it better, I will definitely get it to you guys.

To give you a bit more information on it, the script pulls in a CSV file with all the user information (with dynamic column locating! Woo! Format flexibility!), pre-parses all the information into memory, launches iTunes, signs out any currently signed in Apple ID, goes to the iBooks App Store page (with a nifty little non-gui-scripting trick), launches a new account creation from the free app (the only way to create an Apple ID without payment information), and fills in the fields.

It's also intelligent enough to wait for page loads, fails gracefully if a page load times out, logs any users that had to be skipped for whatever reason, can skip individual users rather than failing completely, and upon completion spits out a CSV file with account creation statuses. It also manages to be almost entirely AppleScript, with just a dash of embedded shell script calls, and only GUI scripts iTunes. Even with the GUI scripting, I tried to write in a boatload of error checks to make sure everything is kosher.

Add a "find a time" function to iCal to show invitee calendars for group meetings.

I've got it running OK, but I want to do another largish test before posting. Next week I'm hoping to release it.

500 eh? Chances are the signups will be halted part way through by Apple, as part of their anti-spam protection. You need to get in touch with your Apple Rep and ask that they call off the hounds for your public IP and email domain. That may take a bit, depending on how busy your Apple guy/gal is.

As for the status of the script, Mr. Freimark has done a fantastic job fixing it up while I have been otherwise preoccupied. Last I heard it was functional, but untested. I'll leave it up to him to deem it worthy of release.

Thanks alot fo putting in the work on the script. Ran a couple of test today it works great. thanks again.