Populating Smart Groups with New Devices

[myu]

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.

[AJPinto · Accepted solution]

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.

[myu]

I figured as much ... thanks @AJPinto