Seeking K-12 setup senarios and ideas

[rogerwebst]

For anyone with K-12 setups, how did you utilize buildings, sites, departments and networks?

[blackholemac]

Buildings = we use as actual buildings (19 defined)

Departments = I look at this one more as "deployments". For instance "High School MakerSpace", "High School Science lab", "Music Labs", "Radio TV labs"...mainly when I see department in our JSS, I imagine what deployment the Macs or iOS devices are a part of.

Network segments= we use them and have every single one of them defined, but they aren't something I can rely on too much. For instance "Music Labs" could stretch across two parts of a building, which may be on two different logical subnets. Hopefully you have a small number of subnets on your internal network, they might be useful to cover a part of a building or maybe a whole building in your case.

Sites = I attempted to use them but now regret that we did. So we have a special education cooperative and a career center that we wanted to declare as two separate sites with what was originally thought as someone outside Central IT's control providing day-to-day support. As such, Sites looked attractive to handle that and we would only have to minimally be involved. Eventually the needs of both got to the point that a dedicated person in Central IT under our control was actually hired that had great experience working with me on our JSS. We still have sites, but I wish we didn't given our current support reps.

[rogerwebst]

Thanks. We didn't think sites would be useful to us either.

[lehmanp00]

We have SITES too and I wish I didn't. At 1st, I had it setup that each building was its own SITE and the Techs are each building wouldn't see the other buildings stuff in JSS. However, we have since given them access to the other buildings (because of staff that have more than 1 home building) and now SITES just get in the way.

[Hugonaut]

If you have an SiS you can integrate, or use to make API Calls, DO IT!!!!

For Example, we use departments for students also, 7th, 8th, 9th grade etc. Our SiS Dictates this, when an end user with SiS creds makes a change, Enrollment, Guidance counselor,etc, changes are made automagically on the backend as well. Student Moves from 7th Grade to 8th Grade, SiS Makes an API call to JAMF Moving them to that Department, All policies are then unscoped / scoped accordingly. Very beneficial to have this, A lot of heavy lifting up front, but in the long run you are saving A LOT of Time.