Creating a child organization

Child organizations provide a means of grouping printers based on business needs. This grouping could be for customers of a channel partner or business units of an enterprise.

Note: You must have the Partner Administrator role to create and manage child organizations. For more information, see Partner administrator.

Do I need to create a child organization?

There are two ways of organizing your customers’ printers: a hierarchical structure or a flat structure. The structure you choose determines whether child organizations are needed.

Note: We recommend using the hierarchical structure for organizing your customers’ printers.

Hierarchical structure—Uses a child organization for each of your customers. The printers of each customer are grouped in that customer’s organization, separating printer information between customers. Also, a hierarchical structure lets you grant access to future Lexmark Cloud Services capabilities on a customer-by-customer basis.

Flat structure—A flat structure places all printers from all customers in a single structure. Any future Lexmark Cloud Services capabilities added to one customer are available to all.

Hierarchical structure vs. flat structure
Purpose	Hierarchical	Flat
Identifying a customer’s printers	Printers for each customer are separated into different child organizations.	Printers must be tagged with an identifier to determine which customer is using it.
Finding a specific printer	The customer must be known, or each child organization must be individually searched for the specific printer.	All printers are in one list.
Print activity reporting	A customer’s printer activity can be easily determined by reporting on the print activity of the entire child organization.	A customer’s printer activity must be determined by filtering printers by customer-identifiable means. For example, you can filter printers by tags.
Future Lexmark Cloud Services functionality	Future Lexmark Cloud Services functionality can be selectively granted to individual customers.	Future Lexmark Cloud Services functionality made available to one customer is available to all. Some enhanced functionality may not be supported in a flat structure.
Account management by customers	A customer administrator can be added where needed in individual customer organizations without sharing access to information of other customers.	A customer administrator who is added can see all printer information for all customers.

Creating a child organization

In the Account Management web portal, click Organization > Child Organizations.

Click Create.
Note: If there are no existing child organization, then click Create Child Organization.

In the Organization name field, type a unique name and then click Create Child Organization.

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Creating a child organization

Do I need to create a child organization?

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