[Session] Using the Casper Suite at Axel Springer

Jens Ahrens from Axel Springer took the stage in the Wurtele Thrust Theater to give a multi-part presentation on their implementation of the Casper Suite, and how they aggregate information from multiple systems as they manage thousands of Macs.

Jens started with a review of their rigorous technology requirements, and explained how and why they arrived at their decision to use the Casper Suite in their transition to exclusively using Macs organization-wide. Jens discussed their implementation of a scalable, clustered solution with high-availability, made temporarily more difficult as the discontinuation of the Xserve spurred them to migrate to an alternate operating system in the middle of the project.

After the historical overview, Jens dove deep into the ways they use the JSS API in conjunction with a tool called Spider as the central lifecycle management tool for their organization. For the majority of the administrators in the organization, Spider is the main tool they see on a daily basis, allowing them to have a seamless and consistent experience across platforms regardless of whether they're managing Macs with the Casper Suite or PCs with Microsoft SCCM.

Finally, Jens talked about how they are using Thin Imaging concepts to minimize overhead and more quickly deploy Macs to their end users.

While their transition from Windows technologies has not yet been completed, Axel Springer currently manages over 4,000 Macs using the Casper Suite, with more than 3,000 mobile devices potentially waiting in the wings to be managed. The presentation was quite inspiring, and opened up many possibilities for those in the audience to bring back to their organizations.

If you were not able to join Jens during his presentation, you can join the discussion on JAMF Nation:
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=5673