Working with iMacs in a windows environment

[Steve Voisey]

Kia ora koutou,

We have 12 iMacs in our Music Department that are used to create projects in GarageBand, Logic Pro, and Sibelius. 

Students log in to each workstation with a shared account (year9music...) and save locally. 

 

How are other schools solving this problem? Logic and GarageBand Files are folder packages, so they look very weird in Google Drive. 

And if I install the Google Drive app and sign in with a shared account, it backs up a folder for each machine (and calls them all "iMac"). That's just confusing. 

I'm not a fan of thumb drives. 

I've been working all year trying to find a way for students to efficiently back up their work. The best I've got is for students to AirDrop to the teacher at the end of the class.

I'd appreciate any and all ideas. 

Ngā mihi

Steve

[Hayden Borrows]

In terms of day to day usage, all our macs are domain joined so each users documents are their own.

When submitting work or reviewing, the projects are uploaded to teams which hasn't had any issues as the file isn't opened in transit, and final submission is exported to mp3.

Since configuring the domain via Jamfschool, i haven't had any issues with users signing in, however I do recall when it was configured manually, that every few months we would have to rejoin the device to the domain.

Kind Regards

Hayden

[Steve Voisey]

Thanks Hayden

So students save to a network drive?

Steve

[Sam McNeill]

I really, really encourage you to not be domain joining Macs anymore. Neither Apple or MSFT recommend this.

The most common way I see this solved Steve is using Jamf Connect for dynamic local user creation, so a similar result to Hayden but using Entra credentials.

Happy to chat off list for further infor

[Dion McGovern-Allen]

Here at Feilding High, our macs are also still domain joined.

Mainly so they have separate accounts.
Eventually we will move away from this, if only to cut down on server licensing requirements.
Although the local papercut system might keep it around for a little bit longer.

They all have local storage on the machines and just use onedrive to upload their files.
I believe the music teacher had a hard drive that they'd use for some of the students.
Otherwise USB drives were allowed.
The students have to use the same machine otherwise.

Otherwise, what comes to mind is that you can create managed AppleIDs for them.

Federate Apple School Manager with Google.
Off the top of my head, the iCloud education accounts have 200GB of storage.

I would think that Garageband and Logic Pro would have native support for iCloud saving - for a more seamless experience.

Thanks,

Dion McGovern-Allen.

IT Manager.

[Stephen Moran]

You could also use Xcreds for dynamic user creation based on their google accounts, similar to Jamf Connect. Unfortunately it doesn’t get you SSO to Google Drive, so they need to sign in there to upload the projects but it’s still safer than trying to manage google accounts within a shared user based sign in.  I haven’t seen any issues with storage of apples project files in Drive, as you say, it just looks weird. 

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Stephen Moran

On 31 Jul 2025, at 11:09, Dion McGovern-Allen <bossdoo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Here at Feilding High, our macs are also still domain joined.

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[Parker, Andy]

It seems like Mac OS 26 will introduce Authenticated Guest Mode 🙂

From https://samuelmcneill.com/2025/06/24/key-features-of-macos-26-revealed-at-apple-wwdc/

Bonus Techie Highlight: Device Management Migration and Authenticated Guest Mode

Why it matters: Often the major highlights from WWDC overshadow some of the more technical improvements being made by Apple. The introduction of authenticated guest mode allows users to quickly sign into a Mac with their organisational credentials (think Microsoft/Okta) or even using an NFC key stored in their iPhone wallet. This level of enterprise integration with Mac will help secure further credibility for macOS in larger organisations and the Device Management Migration announcements mean system administrators can more easily migrate devices from one MDM to another (learn more).

Andy Parker Director of ILT

P +64 9 520 4159  D +64 9 520 8841 M +64 21478379 E andy....@stcuthberts.school.nz St Cuthbert’s College – 122 Market Road Epsom, Auckland 1051, New Zealand stcuthberts.school.nz

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From: techies-f...@googlegroups.com <techies-f...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Dion McGovern-Allen <bossdoo...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, 31 July 2025 11:09 am
To: Techies for schools <techies-f...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [techies-for-schools] Re: Working with iMacs in a windows environment

 

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[Carl Gamble]

Hi All

I'll second Sam McNeill on this - domain joining a Mac is not recommended and it’s something you should try to avoid if at all possible. 

There may be some edge cases where devices are permanently connected to a wired network (labs) but please don’t domain join laptops as the end-user experience will be horrific.

Instead, I would recommend:

• Manage your Macs with MDM - Jamf, Intune, etc
• Use the MDM to leverage Apple’s built in identity integrations like Platform SSO to sync the local account credentials to your identity provider - most MDM’s like Jamf and Intune support this

In addition, I would strongly encourage anyone who’s managing Macs in a school environment to test the beta versions of macOS 26 (Tahoe) in association with your MDM vendor as there are some new features coming very soon (Platform Single Sign-on extending to the macOS login screen and Authenticated Guest Mode) that will make life much easier.

Regards

Carl Gamble

Systems Engineer 

Apple Business & Enterprise

On 31 Jul 2025, at 11:09, Dion McGovern-Allen <bossdoo...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Steve Voisey]

Thanks everyone. Rest assured: I won’t go back down that BIND rabbit hole. 

I have very limited options due to… many reasons. 

I think Airdropping is by far the simplest. 

Steve

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