Setting "User and Location" information

[GeorgeCasper]

Hello!

The "User and Location" information for our computer records is important for scoping a number of our policies. Historically, we've set this information at deploy time, using Recon. Unfortunately, since we've upgraded to 9.97, we're unable to use Recon to set this information; it simply bails out with a "jamf binary failed to install," and this seems to be a consistent problem that we've been unable to resolve with Jamf Support.

The only other way to set this information, as far as I'm aware, is via the JSS. That can work, but I'm wondering how most of you set that information, or even if you use it at all for scoping policies?

[dudzikj]

In the last group I worked in, we filled out the User and Location information because we had a one to one kind of model; some users with multiple machines. It made it easier for us to track what machines belonged to which users. Additionally, we had a boatload of departments in the institution that we supported, so we found it necessary to have the location information filled out for the purposes of scoping policies to those individual departments. For lack of a better way to do it though, we had a policy where at the time of deployment and/or any time a QuickAdd package was run, the tech responsible was instructed to log into the JSS and fill out the User and Location info.

In the group I am currently working in (computer lab environment), our machine names indicate the room that the computers are sitting in, and we create smart groups based on those names. We scope policies to the resulting smart groups, so user and location information on individual machines are not particularly important or useful to us.

[RobertBasil]

We have different buildings with a different subnet in each so we use the Network Segments to set our building in the JSS.

We have mostly iMacs though.

That way if a machine is moved to a different building (hot swap back from repair etc...) we know where it is automatically once it connects to the network.

We do not assign users to a machine.

But like @dudzikj we do our scoping policies by the unique computer name (Lab number, Teacher etc...)