Site Configuration for Retail

steve.schwartz

We are deploying Atera in our environment. We have 100+ retail stores across the US, each with 2-20 employees. We were instructed to run in IT Department mode, but we do function somewhat similar to an MSP, with all the different locations we support. Anyone out there using Atera in a similar fashion? How did you setup your Sites (import CSV/Azure Sync)? Any tricks to automating the association of users with their stores? Thanks in advance!

tanderson

@steve.schwartz We use the MSP version, but if you switch to that, you could set up each location as a new customer. Then, sign into your O365 account for each site but select only one group to sync. Then, in O365, set up groups for each location and apply the users to that group. Probably the easiest way to get the users to sync correctly in Atera. Any new user will be added to the location group and then pulled down to the correct "customer" in atera. I have not tested to see if you can sign into the same O365 tenant in multiple customers, however, so that would need to be confirmed. If it does allow you to do so then this should work for you.

steve.schwartz

Definitely something I will try, thanks!

Sarah_from_Atera

Hey @steve.schwartz , Sarah from Atera here.

With the IT Department version you're on, you can set up each Site as a different location. You can then set up different folders within each site if you need further division.

The sync that was explained by @tanderson should work for you too!

steve.schwartz

Thanks, I think we may have found our solution. I created a list of all store locations, which will be uploaded to create the sites. I then used powershell to match AD users to store numbers and update the office attribute . My hope is that once these are matching, all users will automatically be assigned to their sites using the office field. I'll know in an hour or so.

I appreciate the suggestions, it took some trial-and-error to get our foundation started, but we want to get it right before building out the entire system.

steve.schwartz

Update: Adding users with "office" attribute equal to site name does allow them to import into the correct sites. Unfortuntely, once the user is imported, changes to the user's office location are not reflected in Atera. We have quite a bit of movement of employees between stores, so that will still be a manual process to reassign site membership.