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I've often read on posts (or heard on YouTube videos) the admonition that one really shouldn't have many PreStage Enrolments without really being told the reason why not. Here I am looking at 8 of them and I can see that apart from one (Staff Macbooks which require Jamf Connect Config Profiles in PreStage), there really isn't that much difference between Lab 1, Lab 2, etc PreStages so I could technically combine them to just Lab PreStage. However, I assign computers to each PreStage and use the PreStage "membership" to populate our Smart Groups (e.g. Lab 1 Smart Group has criteria of memberof Lab 1 PreStage).

 

If you are using a single PreStage for all your devices, how do you populate your Smart Groups? The only way I can see is if you make multiple criteria using "Serial Number equals XXXX" with the OR operator which I find more tedious than just checking them under the correct PreStage.

 

Keen to hear how others are doing it.

As you have learned generally you don't want a lot of Prestage Enrollments. Generally, your Prestage should be just for your most essential device configuration, and absolutely nothing else. Personally, I would not be using Prestage for a smart group criteria. For example, my environments get two.



  • One is for the engineering lab so we can adjust the Prestage for testing without worry of impacting production,

  • other is obviously production.


 


As far as smart groups, it's really up to you.



  • If your labs have IP ranges, you can set a smart group to drop a computer in to a specific group based on its network location. 

  • You can enable a popup menu extension attribute, which would add a dropdown list to the device record. Set the popup menu to have whatever you want like lab1 and lab2, then a smart group to pull devices based on what value that dropdown has set.

  • There are many other options, but these are the most basic.


 


In the end it is ultimately up to the needs of your environment. Best practice is just that, a best practice, if something works better to meet your needs then that is totally valid and what you should be doing.

I figured as much ... thanks @AJPinto 

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