Roll out a batch of devices

Time needed: half a day for planning, then roughly 10 minutes per device.

Doing 50 devices is not 50 times harder than doing one — but only if you plan first.

Step 1 — Plan the groups

Write down the groups before you touch a device. Keep the names boring and obvious:

• Year-7-Tablets, Year-8-Tablets
• Staff-Laptops
• Front-Desk-Kiosks

One group per set of devices that should share the same rules and apps. If two sets need different apps, they need different groups.

Step 2 — Get the policy right on one device

Do not roll out to 50 devices and then discover the policy is wrong.

1. Enrol one device into the group.
2. Wait for it to check in and show green in Devices.
3. Use it for a day the way a real user would.
4. Fix anything the policy got wrong.

Step 3 — Prepare the room

• Power strips — enrolment drains batteries.
• Wi-Fi that will take all the devices at once. Ask whoever runs your network first.
• A printed list of serial numbers, so you can tick them off.
• Two piles: "not done" and "done".

Step 4 — Enrol in batches of ten

For each batch:

1. Generate the tokens you need for that group.
2. Enrol the devices — Android or Windows.
3. Tick off each serial number as it appears in Devices.
4. Stop and check the console before starting the next batch.

Checking after each batch means a mistake costs you ten devices, not fifty.

Step 5 — Check the whole batch

In Devices, filter by the group and confirm:

• the count matches what you enrolled,
• everything has checked in recently,
• everything shows as compliant, and
• the right apps have arrived.

Anything still amber is normally waiting on the user to set a screen lock. Note it and hand the device over with instructions.

Step 6 — Label and hand out

Physically label devices with an asset number and record who received which serial. The console tells you the state of a device; only your own record tells you who is holding it.

Common mistakes

• One giant group. You lose the ability to give different people different rules. Split early; merging later is easy, splitting later is not.
• Generating all tokens up front. They are shown once and easy to mix up. Generate per batch.
• Skipping the pilot device. Nearly every painful rollout skipped this step.