About Library For All

Library For All (LFA) is an Australian-based charity supporting global literacy by ensuring access to high-quality and culturally relevant books all around the world. They provide digital tools and services designed to work in harsh and remote environments, on or off-grid, and have supported educational causes for over 10 years with the goal of improving the education of 20 million children by 2030.

Introducing Spark Kits

The Spark digital classroom kit consists of 40 tablets preloaded with LFA’s award-winning digital library and educational resources. They’re provided in a custom-made, secure case that includes charging and network connectivity to keep LFA’s tablets current with both frequent content and security updates.

The tablets themselves are supplied in a rugged, brightly colored case, remaining protected and visible in any environment. They’re powered by Android and benefit from all the management capabilities and solutions the modern Android Enterprise ecosystem offers.

The challenge

LFA reached out to the mambo EMM team in August 2022 with a problem. They had 8,000 Android tablets raring to go and no means of managing them.

These devices were being prepped to ship to Ukraine within the month amidst the conflict, and the prospect of having zero visibility and control over their estate once the Spark Kits left HQ was simply not viable.

Guaranteeing devices were secure, child-safe, and up to date wouldn’t be possible without manually checking devices one by one.

Ensuring the applications and content these devices needed to function were present, updated, and unable to be tampered with couldn’t be guaranteed.

Establishing basic security, such as the inability to wipe a device or prevent the addition of unwanted apps and accounts that would allow devices to be used in ways they weren’t intended, couldn’t be stopped.

Not to mention the prospect of manually setting up thousands of devices, adding Google accounts, installing applications through Google Play, and applying basic security defaults to each device.

How mambo EMM helped

With under a month from starting the engagement to Spark kits landing in Ukraine, the mambo EMM team worked around the clock to facilitate quick, painless enrolment for LFA’s thousands of devices.

Out of the box configuration

With mambo EMM’s zero-touch integration, LFA’s devices were ready to enroll from the moment they were taken out of the box. What’s more, with the appropriate configurations for zero-touch applied, devices are provisioned directly into Ukrainian rather than their default system language, with all language and locale settings automatically set without the need for human interaction per device.

Seamless application management

mambo EMM’s managed Google Play integration allowed LFA to upload and distribute their private applications simply and quickly, without the unnecessary complexity associated with a full Google Play developer account, and further leveraged mambo EMM’s application policy features to define application update control, permissions management, and automate several other application requirements that would require user intervention if installed outside of Android management.

Through mambo EMM, LFA were able to pre-install their suite of applications silently and automatically to all devices before deployment, and with local connectivity are able to deploy app updates in the very same way. Furthermore, LFA's unique custom launcher provided device users with a controlled, managed environment wherein only apps and settings LFA wished to be accessible on their tablets were available, achieved though mambo EMM's kiosk policy controls.

Simple security and configuration management

To further reduce time in staging, LFA leveraged mambo EMM’s robust policy framework to apply consistent security and configuration defaults across their estate, saving precious minutes per device for configurations that would otherwise need to be set manually.

Preventing factory resets, blocking sideloading of untrusted applications, preventing access to device developer settings, and leveraging mambo EMM’s network management capabilities to pre-set trusted Wi-Fi networks used by the Spark Kits are just some of the benefits of deploying devices through mambo EMM, with the latter offering additional benefits in the ability to prevent tampering with EMM provisioned networks out in the field.

mambo EMM enabled LFA to provide a robust and portable education solution for children in need, ensuring safe access to high-quality and culturally relevant content to continue their learning.

Support to rely on

The mambo EMM team was there to help through every step of LFA’s deployment. What started with a demo from the team’s resident experts soon turned to the onboarding of LFA with a policy workshop, defining management approaches, best practices, security considerations, and more.

The mambo EMM team remained on-hand to offer tailored support throughout the preparation of Ukraine deployment, right through to the day-to-day support in-field.

“We couldn't have delivered our impact without mambo EMM - their support in particular was excellent, responding quickly when we needed and adapting the service as our requirements changed in this difficult context” said Daniel Clifton, CEO of LFA.

The result

Working together with mambo EMM, LFA has been able to significantly reduce time to deployment, the need for resources on the ground managing tablets, and the ability to remotely control and update their Android estate from anywhere in the world. What's more, as needs shift over time, LFA will be able to dynamically modify their use cases and adapt to new requirements on-demand and over the air.

Learn more about LFA (opens new window), or donate (opens new window) to their cause.

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