All the bells and whistles, but support could use a hand
April 19, 2020

All the bells and whistles, but support could use a hand

Jenny Nelson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Jamf Pro

We use Jamf Pro to manage our fleet of nearly 1300 iPads, 100+ MacBooks, and several Apple TVs across both buildings at our school district. The software allows us to be more effective by scheduling and automating tasks, and saves us time from having to touch devices to make things happen. We are not officially to zero-touch, but after we have our workflow done in a sandboxed environment, deployment to production simply involves unpacking, affixing asset tag labels, putting devices in cases, and handing off to the end-user. After a few steps, they are up and running, and if something changes mid-year we can push out or hold back updates as needed. We get to be very hands-off and are able to quickly respond to changes district-wide.
  • If Apple will allow an MDM to do it, you can do it, and more with Jamf Pro.
  • Jamf Nation, the online forum for users, is an amazing resource for support and ideas.
  • The people that work at Jamf are awesome.
  • The company has grown quite a bit in recent years, and technical support has unfortunately suffered as a result. They are catching up there but there is room for improvement.
  • Requested features that have a lot of support are often slow to be implemented. There is a large backlog of things we've been promised, and sometimes things are fast-tracked that leave many users scratching their heads wondering why that got the attention.
  • Updates have been more stable in the last couple of years, but there are many bugs or product issues that linger on and on that we would really like to see cleaned up.
  • When I started 6 years ago, one task would take me at least a solid week to accomplish. With modifications to the workflow, I can now get this done in less than 5 minutes.
  • We would need at least 1 additional FT employee to get done what we do with Jamf if we didn't use it. If we went back to the old way it would also take devices out of the hands of end-users, resulting in a loss of instructional time.
I may be spoiled by starting out as long ago as I did with support. At that time every account had a Technical Account Manager. That was who we worked with when we needed help, and we developed a good working relationship with those people. A restructuring meant that we just went into a queue and would get whoever we got. We got a "buddy" instead, and that person is kind of our liaison; they don't really do the technical side, more customer service. There are different tiers of support; if you do chat support you are chatting with people that are just starting out and the process can be lengthy and often results in you getting the information you could get if you took the time to just go on JamfNation to read a Knowledge Base article or a discussion post. Phone support is the next level up; they've been there a bit longer and are more familiar with where to go to look for the same info and are a bit quicker on their feet, but still not up to answering most of the technical questions I call in with. From there it gets escalated to engineering, and it can go up several levels. The people that were really good have been moved to Premium support, so you have to pay more to get to work with them. Support takes awhile and can involve a lot of going back and forth. The best bet is to ask to get on a call and share your screen so you can show exactly what's going on in your environment.

Do you think Jamf Pro delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Jamf Pro's feature set?

Yes

Did Jamf Pro live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Jamf Pro go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Jamf Pro again?

Yes

For teams with fewer people, a good MDM is a must. I can't imagine working in our environment without one. Jamf is the most comprehensive MDM you will find. There may be features that some won't need or use. In which case, a less expensive option may be more reasonable. We are an education customer, and there is a discount for that, but the price is considerable otherwise.