Catagories

[SteveWalker]

Our Jamf Pro instance features an astounding 69 Catagories in Settings/Global.

Personally I'd like to reduce this down to a maximum of 10.

I'm wondering how others approach organisation of their Jamf Pro and Self Service... in particular, those who work in an education space.

[PaulHazelden]

I don't have quite that many, but I do have a fair few. I think 40 something.
I have a couple of Test categories, one for Self Service and one for all new stuff, to make it quick and easy to find.
I then have some Device set up ones, and some for regular events like updating.
After that I pretty much split them into Configurations, Self Service, and the various Departments around the college.
And finally I have a place to dump stuff no longer in use, I have learned the hard way to never throw away a configuration untill every Mac has reported in and removed it. I do the same for Apps too, un-scope them and wait. Old packages also get moved to the not in use category.
It all depends on how you want to organise. If you can do it with 10 then go for it.

To me in some parts of Jamf, the Categories are not needed. Add a package to a policy, and there they all are showing all of the packages and their category, but you cant filter the list to show only one category - which would be helpful if you have over 1000 packages in the list. But then if you look at your Configurations or Policies, they all get split up by the Category, and you can quickly navigate to what you are looking for.

[shannon_pasto]

Higher Ed engineer here.

The way I approach Categories is keep them simple and to a single word (where possible). Things like Applications, Security, Patching, Help Desk, macOS, Privacy Preferences etc. Remember that the category you assign to a policy doesn't have to be the same as the category you assign to a Self Service policy. Most of those work for all elements of Jamf (ie profiles, policies, Self Service) however some are only used for profiles like Privacy Preferences...that's what I do anyway.

If you're in a team, best to discuss what everyone's thoughts are. If you don't have a DEV instance, reach out to Jamf as you should be able to get one. Here you can play with a layout.

I strictly avoid special characters like brackets, $, * etc. I only permit spaces, - and _

[agungsujiwo]

Hi @SteveWalker ,

I created education categories based on class,
for staff based on department .

[jamf-42]

with categories.. less is more.. I have around 20.. everything should be top level.. Installers, Patch Reporting, EDR,  CIS, Baseline Config Profiles, etc.. no getting into the weeds..no 'adobe' 'microsoft' etc etc..  for Self Service.. again.. top level, but with bullet points so they break out different:

• app catalog

• pilot

• support

10 is going to be tricky.. but ~70 is waaaay too many.. 

[sdagley]

I'm not going to replicate everything that @PaulHazelden and @shannon_pasto have already posted since I pretty much agree with both, but I do think 10 categories is too few. One area alone that I have more than 10 for is Configuration Profiles so that I have a more visible delineation of relative macOS versions instead of just the scope column. Eventually those will go away with DDM but I'll still be in the 30+ range.