Managing 30 iPads

[Katol]

Hi all
Does anyone have any experience with managing a load of iPads at the same time? From next year onwards the company I work for is going to give each sales rep an iPad and I have been given the dubious job of supervising the whole process. I need to know things like, if each sales guy has his own itunes account is there a way for the company to store things like apps which everyone should have on a kind of "corporate" itunes account which the sales guys could go to to download the apps? Or do we need to buy the same app 30 times - one for each rep? How many people use one account - if such a thing as a corporate account even exists? Dows anyone have any ideas as to the best apps for storing files - I use Good Reader but maybe there's something better?

Any advise you guys could give would be really, really appreciated.
K

 

[AQ_OC]

I'm sure Apple & developers would be happier if you all had 30 accounts and bought 30 copies of software. In most cases, the apps are inexpensive comparatively speaking, so it is not a harsh burden (unless you are using some of the really expensive apps). Also, if each employee has their own personal itunes account, they have the ability to use other apps they might find helpful.

I have not heard of corporate accounts for Apple mobile devices. They seem to be very consumer oriented these days. I would love to hear what others know about this, however. This seems like something that will come up again and again in the future.

Good Reader, IMO, is a top app. I would not be without it. I use it for work everyday, mostly presentations and annotations of PDFs. But I also use it to store and file info. When you do a backup, GoodReader is very good about making sure all of your stuff is backed up and restored (I have lost PDF I had stored in iBooks after a restore). It has support for various types of clouds, and it plays movies and music (not that this is important to you). And it does more. I'm not in a position to say it is the best because I have not tested its compeitition, but I like GoodReader. As a company, if you write them requesting a feature or with a problem, you get a response. I have seem features I requested show up in the app in mere months (features that require programming and testing to implement). Well worth whatever I paid for it.

 

[DefBref]

Apple - iPad in Business - IT Center

 

[AQ_OC]

didn't take long to learn something!

 

[Katol]

Thanks for the info and shortcut - I'll go and do some reading

K