Chromebook Deployment Tip: Automatically place devices into appropriate OUs upon enrollment

Today I realized that some things in the Google Apps (Chrome) Management Console and some best practices that we are doing seem trivial or common knowledge but others may not be aware and may benefit. This tip revolves around getting a larger shipment of Chromebooks and how to enroll them so they go into the proper OU automatically.

Let's get started

Background: I work in a K-12 district in Minnesota with about 10K students and we are heading in the direction of 1:1 (long term plan) with Chromebooks (at lease for now). We currently have 1,150 Chromebooks in our system from pilots and a shipment last Spring. In February we will be getting several thousand more and we'll be officially on our way.

-TIP-

Problem

How do you get Chromebooks to automatically go into the right OU in your Dashboard upon enrollment? You don't want them all to just be in the Root OU, right?

Solution

Create a Gapps account for each school (or OU), create the OU (if needed) your devices will go into, place the account into it's proper OU, turn on "place device in user organization", enroll Chromebooks with the appropriate user.

-HOW TO-

#1 Create an account for each school or OU you want the devices to go into. So, in our situation we want our devices to be in the School OU where the device is physically located. We have 15 schools so we created a Gapps account for each school.

#2 Create (if needed) an OU for the devices to be placed into. We created a "Devices" OU for each school. See below an example of where the "Devices" OU is located in our OU structure.

#3 Place the Gapps account which you created in step #1 into the associated OU you created in step #2. So, I will put the Jefferson High School Gapps user account into the "Devices" OU I circled up above.

#4 Go to Device Management/Chrome Management/Settings (Device Settings). First make sure that you have the correct OU selected up above. Whatever OU is selected will take on the settings that you set and apply here. In our case, we have the root OU selected because we want this setting to be applied to all of our devices.

#5 Look in the Device Enrollment section. Make sure that the "Place device in user organization" setting is selected.

#6 Final step is to make sure that you enroll with the appropriate Gapps account on the appropriate device. In other words make sure you have the set of Chromebooks going to X elementary school and enroll with X Gapps account.

Grab a drink, you're done!

Bam. Those devices will automatically get put into the OU that you want upon enrollment. Another benefit is that the account in the "user" column in the management console will be the school's, so in case that device gets stranded you can see where it should be.

*This could be done by a vendor (if they provide a white glove service). If you are purchasing a large amount of devices I highly recommend requesting this.

*This could be done if you do your own "white glove service" and enroll them yourself. For example: each media person gets their shipment of Chromebooks and are given their school's gapps account to enroll the devices with.

**This works when you have the "allow devices to enroll automatically" setting on. I do not know if the placement of devices in OUs works when you have to manually enroll devices (when you have to hit the command+control+E -- or something like that).

I realize I should be documenting our journey of a large Chromebook deployment. I'll probably end up making some sort of Best Practices Doc or something down the road. I'll figure it out after my first 2-3 posts about it.