Re: Allow librarian to enable and disable Chromebooks

[James SEYMOUR]

Hi Carl,

My advice would be to stick with GAMADV-XTD3, regardless, as you can acheive alot more with this version.

WRT to disabling Chrome devices, have you considered running a scheduled task against a Google Sheet. You could share the Google Sheet with the librarians and they enter the serial numbers as required. We have a process like this for deprovisioning devices. Our helpdesk team fill in the Google Sheet and a cron job runs at an alloted time to deprovion. Data validation can be used to ensure the correct text is entered as needed. For our devices we have a school asset tag number which is entered into the annotatedAssetId field so it is much easier to identify misisng devices as these are the number that are recorded against users.

On Saturday, 2 September 2023 at 02:16:39 UTC+8 Carl Sundermann wrote:

Hi everyone, I have a project I'm working on that I could use a little thought guidance.

End goal: Give our 12 building librarians an easy way to enable and disable Chromebooks. (it's amazing how fast "lost" ones are returned when they get disabled...)

What I've done: As a proof of concept, I duplicated my own GAM install on a librarian's machine. I gave them three batch files: One that checks status, one that enables, and one that disables. They scan the barcode (ie-serial) and it just works. For example, here's the script of the "status" bat file:

----

@echo off
set /p chromebookserial= Enter Chromebook barcode to CHECK STATUS:
cd datafiles
gam cros_sn %chromebookserial% info status
pause

------

So, as you can see, it's pretty simple.  I am using GAMADV-XTD3.

So knowing that the proof of concept works, I wanted to set up a new instance of GAM with limited scope, different account for logging purposes, and have this be able to live on a shared network drive for easy management/instruction/etc.

Because of the simplicity I was looking for, I tried to set this up with Standard GAM, vs Extended GAM.  But if I'm looking at it correctly, Standard GAM doesn't do the "cros_sn" command...  It needs the "device ID".

So I think I have to go back to Extended GAM for this.  However...  This doesn't appear to be as "portable", where I could just have it on a network drive for the librarians (and only the librarians) to access.  It seems there is more setup to the Extended Version and having some dependencies on the machine itself.

Am I correct?  And probably more to the point...  If you were trying to solve this, how would you do it?  

Thanks everyone for your input.

Carl

[Kim Nilsson]

Hiya Carl,

I built the function of enable/disable into my web app CB_QueryDetails.

It's both free and open source, so you can change it to do whatever you want.

I recommend you also check the code of the Swedish version, CB_DeviceDetails, as that may already have the features you are looking for.

The actual code logic is of course still English. It's just the menus and things that are in Swedish as I built it for a Swedish school.

When using it, the users an be given the Device Management admin access for only the relevant OUs, and not the entire organisation, but never have to actually open the admin console.

Using my web app is so much easier.

[DJ Scullin]

We use Snipe-IT (free) for our asset inventory. Assets have a status (Ready to deploy, Lost, Stolen, Damaged, etc.). Our librarians manage our fleet of Chromebooks in Snipe. Since Snipe has a decent API, we just wrote a script that loops through the Snipe database and uses GAM to move Chromebooks to the appropriate OUs. So when a Chromebook is marked as lost or stolen, it moves into our lost or stolen OU which has rules to disable the device and put up the "I'm lost, please call this number" message.

It's worked pretty well for us. 

Warmly,

DJ

On Tuesday, September 5, 2023 at 8:14:00 PM UTC-5 Carl Sundermann wrote:

Many thanks to both of you for the responses here.  I will look into both of these options.  Kim, thank you for all you do to contribute to the open source community!

[Justin Tongol]

@DJ

Are you able to share that script or even a snippet of it?

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