District profile management

Centralized management of restriction and configuration profiles is a new feature that has been added to the district view. 

We have redesigned the profile list screen and added a lot more flexibility and control for the district user.

We recommend the district user first decide how the district would like to manage profiles and at what level they would like the school administrator to have control. This is explained in the sections to follow. 

The screen is made up of three sections:

1. School profile groups - The list of schools that will receive the selected profiles in a group.
2. Baseline profiles - The minimum set of restrictions on which a Conditional profile is built. 
3. Conditional profiles - Profiles built on a Baseline profile where additional restrictions can be added as well as location and schedule configurations.

All three work together to create a layered profile structure which can then be pushed to a school account. The following steps are recommended to ensure easy implementation and understanding of your profile structure. 

Step 1: Setup your Baseline profiles

You can view these profiles as your building blocks to additional and more advanced configurations which will come later. 

We recommend using an easily understandable naming convention when deciding on your profile names. In the example above we have shown this, naming the Baseline profiles Student Baseline and Teacher Baseline.

These tend to be broad in nature and are used when building up Conditional profiles. 

When you are setting up your Baseline profile restrictions, you will notice the lock icons distributed around the relevant restrictions area. This is where you can decide if you would like additional control and a granular level. This control extends to allowing or not allowing the school administrator to edit the setting you have configured, as well as setting that restriction as not overridable which means that no matter what other profile is being applied at the school level, the restriction is always honored. 

Step 2: Setup your Conditional profiles

Conditional profiles, by their name, allow for additional configurations to be added to the profile furthering the control on the device location and/or the schedule. We refer to these as Where and When settings: 

Locations = When the device enters or exits a location then the profile will be applied or removed. Example: Coordinates, SSID, and/or Beacon setup. 
Schedules = Date and time settings. Example: School day; After hours; Weekends.

Conditional profiles are built on top of Baseline profiles and any lock settings will be inherited. To explain this further, we can use an example:

If a Student Baseline profile is created with the restriction that the camera is not allowed and the lock settings are set to orange (Non-editable by school), then any Conditional profile built on top of this Student Baseline profile will also not allow the use of the camera (and the school administrator will not be allowed to change this).

Easily understandable naming is also recommended here as it can become quite difficult to manage if this is not simply named. On a more practical note and to follow on from the baseline example, we recommend naming a Conditional profile built on the Student Baseline profile:
High School Student - School Day or High School Student - After School.

Any updates made to the Student Baseline, when saved and pushed, will be reflected in the Conditional profiles created on top of that updated Student Baseline profile. 

Step 3: Creating your School Profile Groups and pushing your profiles to your schools

Once you have setup up your Baseline profiles and your Conditional profiles, you can then decide which schools you would like to push these profiles to. This introduces the centralized profile management features, newly added to the Mobile Guardian product suite. 

This is where you would need to be clear with how you would like to manage your schools. In the example above we have separated the schools into Elementary School, Middle School and High School; and then added the relevant schools to those groups. 

This allows you to manage all High School profile updates at once and removes the requirement to duplicate these changes at a per school level (which may be very time-consuming). 

A point to note here is that as you are selecting the Conditional profiles to include in a group, you would also need to select a Baseline profile for the group. This is what we call a Default Baseline profile and this is the profile that will be applied if no other Conditional profile is active (i.e. when there is a gap in your location and schedule configurations). This ensures that your devices are protected and under control at all times. 

Pushing your profiles down to the school account: 

Great, now you are all set to push these profiles to your school profile groups using the Push action on the righthand side. 

Points to note about the Push action:

• It will update all the schools in the group with the latest profile changes.
• If a school already has profiles created then these profiles will be added to the school profile list.
• Only the profiles pushed will be updated at the school level. 

If you would like to see if a profile group has been pushed correctly then you can navigate to the school account profile screen and confirm if the updates have been applied.

The School Account Profile screen will show which profiles have been a push by the district (this is shown with the tick icon). 

Please let us know if you found this helpful! 

Thanks for reading :)