Intronis Cloud Backup + Recovery Blog

Save time, Save Piece of Mind with Groups and Templates

  

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In Matt Kowalski’s latest blog post about MPG, he mentioned a gem of a new feature, Groups and Templates, designed to streamline the process of setting up preferences and notifications. This functionality is, to me, one of the greatest tools partners can use to maximize efficiency and reduce Manhours Per Gigabyte, so it’s only appropriate that it gets its own blog post, right?

Previously, to configure preferences and notifications for specific clients’ installations, you had to do them one at a time by hand. Partners complained. We listened. Now, you can use Groups and Templates to apply settings to any or all computers at once. So here’s the skinny on how it works.

You can set up a Template in the Admin tab of your management portal. Just mouse over the Admin tab and choose Templates to get started. Create a new Template and choose whether it’s a Preferences or a Notifications Template in the first step of the wizard. Remember, you can create and apply as many as you want. You can create one to have all your clients automatically upload logs to the portal, or one to have all accounts generate specific Backup Failed notifications, or even have all of your clients limiting bandwidth during office hours. I could go on for days, but as the saying goes, “brevity is the soul of wit,” so I’ll cut this short and leave you with the Knowledge Base article I wrote on Templates.

Then, you can use the Groups view in your Manage tab to apply your Templates. When you go to the Manage tab, your default view is all of your clients’ accounts in alphabetical order. But click that “Groups View” button above and you’ll see all of them are in a sorting called Default Group. Now if you wanted to take one of your Templates and apply it to all your clients, just click that Default Group’s row so it turns blue. Apply Template will appear above and to the right, and from there, you’re just a click or two away from getting those settings applied. You can have more fun with this view, though, if you choose Create Group in the upper-right to start sorting your clients’ computers by some common qualifiers. I created four groups – Servers, Workstations, Laptops and Test Computers, and then sorted the appropriate Computer IDs from there. With that, I’m able to apply special Templates to each group. Now when I haven’t had a backup on my traveling laptop for a few days, I get a No Recent Backups notification instead of a ton of Missed Backup notifications, because hey, I know my shut laptop is missing backups here and there. And again, to try to keep it short, here’s my Knowledge Base article on Groups.

If you need a walkthrough, just call our support team at 1-800-569-0155 option 2. Don’t spend another minute fiddling with one account at a time – make checking out this feature a priority.