Smart vs. Static groups

@USD497 Are you using DEP?

You should be able to add a different pre-stage to student vs staff.. then can create Smart Groups & scope profiles that way

Yes. We are using DEP. We setup a pre-stage enrollment for all DEP iPads. Then I wanted to setup a Smart group for teachers to push out their restricted configuration profile. I just wanted to make sure that a Smart group was the way to go and that it didn't put too much load on the server.

Thank you!

In this case, @bentoms is suggesting to assign the smart group to different Pre-Stage enrollments. In this scenario, you would need to assign teacher devices to one pre-stage enrollment and student devices to another pre-stage enrollment, then assign the smart group to that. This is not a scenario where you create a smart group and manually enter each serial number into it, that would create additional overhead and would be the wrong tool for the job.

Unless I'm missing something that @bentoms sees, there is no way to scope a DEP PreStage Enrollment to a specific Smart Group or Static Group. Your only option is to select specific devices in the scope of a PreStage Enrollment.

If you know in advance which specific devices are going to faculty vs. students, then you could create separate DEP PreStage Enrollments for faculty and students. Then in each PreStage you could set the department that the device goes into and then create a SmartGroup that keyed off of that department.

To answer the question @USD497 had in the OP, SmartGroups would not impact performance on the server with such a low device count. I would imagine you could get to several thousand devices before you might see a performance hit. To utilize a SmartGroup for this endeavor, you would simply need some piece of information about the iPads to key off of, whether that is department, building, or something else.

And as for the question about Static Groups in the OP, if you delete a device from the JSS, it will be removed from any groups it is a part of, including Static Groups.

We use 1 DEP pre stage and scope config profiles (and app deployments) to smart groups based on device names. The only pain is manually naming devices (configrator can be helpful in some situations).

@stevewood Yea what @Jerod said better explains it.

Assign a DEP prestage to some devices, then scope a smart group to that prestage. (Sort of backwards to how you posted/read into what I said).