Organisation Nodes Best Practice and Performance Considerations

What are the purpose of organisation nodes?

• The organisation node (in the Snow Management and Configuration Center on-premises and on Snow Atlas) is used to show the legal organisational structure of a company, and not the physical structure.
• To keep the processing of data to a minimum it should only represent the legal organisation of the company for licencing and agreement assignment. 
• It is NOT intended to separate out the physical assets of an organisation by location and should not be used for this purpose.

Defining the organisation structure

• The organisation structure should be setup according to how software is being procured and business reporting needs.
• It is not necessary to follow your company organization structure, Active Directory (AD) OU or containers. 
• Define an organization structure that will help you to start gaining control rather than to meet all strategic goals or every licensing situation.
• Your initial organization structure does not need to be complete from the beginning, because additional organization nodes can be added later to meet your growing business needs. 
• You are not limited to the number of nodes or node levels, but best practice is to setup an organization structure which has no more than four layers down (e.g. 4 layers maximum). 
• It is important to be aware of how changes to the organisational structure will impact the entire system, because devices, users, reports, licences and agreements are all linked to this structure. 
• If you are not sure about the changes you are making please contact Support who will be able to advise further.

Implications to performance of organisational nodes

• Applying too many organisational nodes can have an impact on performance and resources.
• The organisation node is the top level table within the SQL database and many other sub tables are affected by organisation changes and assignments.
• If there is a requirement to assign assets to a physical location the recommendation would be to setup custom fields for this purpose rather than use organisational nodes.
• The recommended maximum total number of legal organisation nodes is 100, using more can adversely affect performance of the system overall, and imports of a legal organisation structure larger than this may timeout