Onscreen Passcode and Configurator support for AppleTV Deployments

With the lat­est release of both AppleTV 5.1 and iOS 6 Apple takes steps to pro­vide bet­ter enter­prise sup­port for the AppleTV.

In an ear­lier post (Con­sid­er­a­tions for deploy­ing the AppleTV in your school or enter­prise) I pointed out that there needed to be bet­ter options for cen­tral­ized man­age­ment and a more robust way to deal with pass­words.  Apple’s taken steps to improve both of these.

Prior to the 5.1 update you could set a pass­word to con­trol Air­Play access to your AppleTV.  Once entered into the iPad the pass­word was stored in the device.  While this pro­vided a layer of access con­trol and secu­rity it didn’t pre­vent some­one with the pass­word from tak­ing con­trol of the device dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion or inad­ver­tently hijack­ing the AppleTV while on the network.

With the 5.1 release Apple has intro­duced an onscreen pass­code that is required to before you can begin Air­Play­ing to the device.  It also pro­hibits the hijack­ing of the device while some­one is con­nected to it and an added level of secu­rity.  It is impor­tant to note that iOS 6 is required in order for the onscreen pass­code to work so plan accord­ingly if you have a num­ber of devices to update.

One early con­cern we had dur­ing test­ing was the con­nec­tion time-out between the AppleTV and the con­nected iPad.  We found this to be around a minute once the iPad were put in sleep mode unless the per­son were Air­Play­ing music at which point the device would remain con­nect for as long as it was on the same network.

The addi­tion of Con­fig­u­ra­tor sup­port for the AppleTV is a good first step in pro­vid­ing enter­prise con­fig­u­ra­tion sup­port.  This sup­port how­ever is lim­ited by the fact that the AppleTV must be phys­i­cally con­nected to a device to load the con­fig­u­ra­tion profile.

It’s clear that Apple’s first pri­or­ity with its device it with the con­sumer mar­ket.  When it comes to school or the larger enter­prise we are often left try­ing to put a square peg into a round hole.  With these two lat­est updates to the AppleTV soft­ware and iOS 6 Apple has begun to shave down the cor­ners on the square and mak­ing it not such a hard push to get it in the hole.