End of the Year practices

Hello @sietsemaeri for us here at the college, we are going through a massive re-thinking of our JSS. The goal is to simplify everything. For the past years, I have simply left everything in place. This year though, we are creating all new smart groups, policies and profiles. All of these new items are being labeled as NEW to easily identify them. Then as we go through and image our labs, the old is being deleted.

For us, we had too many different individual items and we simply wanted to simplify everything. So far in testing, everything is going great for the most part.

But you are right, reducing clutter is a good thing for all involved. I know many like to retain the information and history and we did. Now it is time to reduce clutter and simplify.

One other point, we are changing the naming structure as well, which is helping immensely. Computers that are named SM- are student Macs, EM- are employee Macs. After the dash, we list our deployment name, biotech, chemistry, physics and so forth. The purpose is to identify the policies and applications being deployed for each type of deployment or function and the student or employee Macs get the appropriate settings needed for those types of computers. Again, it is going really well.

Thanks for the idea's, Im planning a re structure of how devices are going to be named especially in my elementary schools should be easier with app scoping.

One organizational tip I can give is to start using the "position" field in the JSS to your benefit. When we cleaned up our AD a while back, I had our admins assign a value to the title field and mapped it into our JSS. In that field we assigned the following <grad year_internal building code>. With that I can scope apps down to grade levels and/or buildings based on smart group criteria without major intervention. I just have to adjust the criteria of my groups during summer.

We have the same as @blackholemac for our iOS devices. Based on what the user's Position field is, they fall into appropriate smart groups and get the resourcers (profiles, webclips, apps). Works like a charm, and to make any changes, we only need to modify the user record in the LDAP.

These are really great and interesting responses. I find that I have to do almost nothing moving from year to year thanks to the info from everyone here (Along with various jamf training(s)). My SMART groups and profiles should always be ready to move to a new student population. Additionally, our student's computers remove themselves from the JSS during our offboarding process so I don't even have to worry about returning students who will be pre-staged again in the fall (we're BYOD)

That said, I don't use 'classes' so I'm not sure of the best way to help you there.