Organizing Devices - Per Building

[Isaiah Grathen]

Hello all,
 

I wanted to reach out to see how other districts are organizing their devices per building in FW (if you do at all)!

Initially, we thought to try and make Smart Groups based off of Subnet IP but, that would not help if students visited other buildings and pulled the Applications/Profiles associated to that specific IP.

Which leads me here! Does anyone have this in their structure? Are you just having one full Student iPad Smart Group, separating them, etc?

If this question belongs somewhere else, please correct me!

Thank you all,

[Josh Levitsky]

Just throwing this out there, but do you use Custom Fields at all to mark which building they are in? Custom Fields are nice because you could have:

Building - Walter Isaacson Middle School
Grade - ES / MS / HS
Role - Student or Teacher

And then it lets you make smart groups based on any of the fields or a combination of them. Plus Custom Fields can be updated by importing a CSV file to update the values in bulk. 

Since I'm an employee at FileWave and I managed assets in a large media company rather than a school I just wanted to throw out that idea and maybe some other customers who are schools will add to this. 

[Isaiah Grathen]

15 hours ago, Josh Levitsky said:

Just throwing this out there, but do you use Custom Fields at all to mark which building they are in? Custom Fields are nice because you could have:

Building - Walter Isaacson Middle School
Grade - ES / MS / HS
Role - Student or Teacher

And then it lets you make smart groups based on any of the fields or a combination of them. Plus Custom Fields can be updated by importing a CSV file to update the values in bulk. 

Since I'm an employee at FileWave and I managed assets in a large media company rather than a school I just wanted to throw out that idea and maybe some other customers who are schools will add to this. 

Hey Josh,

I appreciate the reply!

I was actually asked this same questions while at HECC and I am beginning to believe that will be our best bet moving forward.

Right now we do not have any kind of custom fields in FW.

Do you think I could still create some Smart Groups that pull each buildings subnet IP and be able to mass apply a Custom Field with the devices being organized in those groups? 

[Josh Levitsky]

3 hours ago, Isaiah Grathen said:

Do you think I could still create some Smart Groups that pull each buildings subnet IP and be able to mass apply a Custom Field with the devices being organized in those groups? 

If you are seeing the IP's in FileWave (hosted customers usually see the IP of their firewall for clients inside) then yes that could be a starting point as long as you keep in mind that 192.168.1.x can be SchoolBuildingA but it can also be at Wendy's or McDonalds so just maybe a little consideration of that if devices could be offsite. 

[Isaiah Grathen]

18 minutes ago, Josh Levitsky said:

If you are seeing the IP's in FileWave (hosted customers usually see the IP of their firewall for clients inside) then yes that could be a starting point as long as you keep in mind that 192.168.1.x can be SchoolBuildingA but it can also be at Wendy's or McDonalds so just maybe a little consideration of that if devices could be offsite. 

Understood! 

Thank you for making me aware of this!

I shall look into this and see how I can apply these custom fields!

[Pierre-Nicolas]

If this is a one shot operation, you can right click on an existing smart group and apply custom field values to all devices currently in the smart group (to be precise, all devices in the current version of the smart group). So if you have already some smart groups based on IP that you want to convert, you can assign custom field value for each SG easily.

If this is too time consuming because you have already hundreds of smart groups, I'd go with script / API approach. You may already have a good old spread sheet with the list of serial numbers for each building ? then you can use the API to assign the custom fields based on the serial.

If you have 1:1 and enforce authentication against Active Directory during enrollment, you may already have the information in your LDAP system (who is attached to which building) - and if you have it in LDAP, you can create a custom field based on LDAP, FileWave will sync inventory with your directory, and you can have smart groups based on these custom fields.

As you see, you have a lot of options, it really depends on what you want to do (one operation, something updating regularly, something directly synchronized with your directory...).

[Isaiah Grathen]

On 11/29/2022 at 11:54 AM, Pierre-Nicolas said:

If this is a one shot operation, you can right click on an existing smart group and apply custom field values to all devices currently in the smart group (to be precise, all devices in the current version of the smart group). So if you have already some smart groups based on IP that you want to convert, you can assign custom field value for each SG easily.

If this is too time consuming because you have already hundreds of smart groups, I'd go with script / API approach. You may already have a good old spread sheet with the list of serial numbers for each building ? then you can use the API to assign the custom fields based on the serial.

If you have 1:1 and enforce authentication against Active Directory during enrollment, you may already have the information in your LDAP system (who is attached to which building) - and if you have it in LDAP, you can create a custom field based on LDAP, FileWave will sync inventory with your directory, and you can have smart groups based on these custom fields.

As you see, you have a lot of options, it really depends on what you want to do (one operation, something updating regularly, something directly synchronized with your directory...).

Hey Nicolas,

Thank you for your response!
I believe we are going the route of cross-referencing with our AD!

We do have authentication in place so that seems the most logical!
Now it's just about making sure our AD information is accurate...

Thank you for your feedback and help!