Some Advise\Guidance

smcs

I love ITFlow and I am becoming an everyday user now, but I have a question and hoping someone can give me some insight on the way this works or should work in the following setup.

I have a client that is a City Hall and the City Hall has several users\assets\pwds\etc but under the City Hall is the Police Department, Fire, Park, Rec, and Water. The way I have it now is the City Hall is the primary and the departments are all locations under the City Hall. First question and welcome to opinions as well, is this the correct way to setup a multi-tier client?

Next: When I run the assets script, it creates the assets without issue, but when looking in the portal, it puts them all together under the City Hall, is it possible to have the assets for a particular Department to go under its respective department? The only way I can see that working is by adding each department in as its own Client so it has its own Primary location. Thoughts on that? In a nutshell I basically want it all separated out by department instead of just mixing all departments in together.

Any Help\Guidance would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

johnny

Hi @smcs

This is a tough one and at first glance it would make sense putting them under one client, but technically they are different entities under one main tax entity but really play separate roles and will have separate cost centers which is used for budgeting internally.

The way I would have set up this client would be to separate them out as individual clients and in Parenthesis at the end of the client name include the main tax entity client which is ([Name of City] City Hall). They would all be invoiced separately but still under the same tax ID. This way they can see what departments are using what in each cost center Department such as Fire, Police. And all entities like contacts, locations, assets, passwords would be properly separated etc.

johnny

Now where separating by location but having one client would make sense would be a car dealership. They have several locations but are really one entity under one domain name.

smcs

Thank you for the input and guidance, I believe I will go this route before I get to far in to it. I never looked at it in that way, I was always looking at it as keep all under one main entity but your way makes sense and seems like the way to go. Like you said this will allow me to keep all of their passwords, files, etc separate so that helps me again. I dont know where we would all be without this forum, thank you for having it for us!

JosephWithCOR

@smcs

I have a similar situation. I actually work for a city admin / parks / public works / building / police (no fire). Initially I had created individual clients for each department. Where I had issues was moving equipment between my 'clients'.

Because of the separation of church (city) and state (police) I have consolidated into two clients city (departments admin / parks / public works / building) and police. Export / Import before I got too far into it. Because of the security requirements for a police department this keeps their specific documents / assets / passwords / networks separate. The rest of the city departments all fall under city hall.

Each department has a different physical address, but use the same billing and tax ID.

Because of the separation I had asked about locking technicians to individual clients because my city backup tech shouldn't be able to see what I have entered for the police. I know he isn't cleared.

It's a tough call either way.

johnny

@JosephWithCOR Thank you for sharing how your setup is done and it makes total sense to separate them into 2 separate entities for obvious reasons.

I see what you mean by the backup tech and he should have to pass clearances. I think anyone in IT should have to pass clearances to be honest.

The good thing about ITFlow is it does include Audit logs and these soon will be expanded to who views what. Like viewing passwords viewing a client page etc.

I also see the need of access control in this situation as well and will hopefully come after we release 1.0 stable next year

JosephWithCOR

@smcs

To answer your question on assets, under city hall create a location for Parks, another for Water, another for Police, etc. This would also work for multi-location clients like a car dealership, or grocery store.

When you are assigning assets under the assignment tab, assign them to the Parks / water / police / etc.

The search box under assets will then display anything assigned to parks / water / police / etc.

Hope this helps!

smcs

@JosephWithCOR Thank you for taking the time on this thread and providing that information, thia will help me out a bunch. Very appreciated!