New computer onboarding

Joining the company? Receiving a new computer and giving up your old one? Here’s what to expect when you open up your new computer.

Before you recieve your new computer

Before your computer’s even arrived on your lap, it’s already been linked to the company. Before you receive your new computer, you may be given a Setup Code. This code is important – you’ll enter it during Stage 1 and it’ll link your computer to you.

Initial setup in Setup Assistant

Once your computer turns on, you’ll go through Setup Assistant. Most of the steps are fairly straightforward – connecting to WiFi, setting up your user account, all that.

Most of the time we’ll try to make sure your computer is already updated before you even pick it up, but if it isn’t, you may be asked to update macOS.

When you get to the step where it asks for an Apple Account or Apple ID, you have two options:

• Skip it and sign in later
• Check your work email for your Apple Account credentials that we’ve created for you.

Automatic installs and configuration

Once you’re out of Setup Assistant, another window will pop up inviting you to continue the process. Here, we’ll start installing our required programs. This includes a number of security related-items and a number of apps that we use for productivity. For more information on required software, please refer to the Required software page in the Knowledgebase.

We also use this time to make important changes to the configuration of your computer that help protect company data and make your experience easier.

Reboot

Once that process is done, you’ll be prompted to reboot your computer. This applies all the settings that we set up earlier and makes sure everything is ready.

Signing in and installing other apps

When your computer boots back up, you’ll start signing in to services and installing other important apps.

Important sign-ins

There are going to be a number of apps that you’ll need to sign into before you can start working.

Cloudflare

At JWA we use Cloudflare Zero Trust to protect our users and data from unsafe websites and applications. We also use it to manage access to certain apps.

You’ll have seen a popup when you booted up to sign in to the Cloudflare WARP app. Follow the steps to sign in with your Google Workspace account and be on your way.

1Password

JWA uses 1Password to manage shared passwords (and we STRONGLY recommend that you also use it to manage your personal work-related passwords). You should have received an invite in your email to connect to the JWA 1Password account - if you haven’t yet, let IT know and we’ll get you set up.

Make sure to open the 1Password desktop app to complete the setup - it’ll be in your Dock or in Applications.

Dropbox

We use Dropbox for file management and sharing. It should’ve been installed automatically during setup but in case it wasn’t, you can open up the Self-Service app to reinstall it.

Make sure to sign in, following the instructions you received in your email. As with all important apps at JWA, if this is your first time setting up an account, you’ll need to enable multi-factor authentication.

When you sign in to Dropbox, you’ll be asked which folders you want to “selectively sync”. By default, we keep these folders synced online-only so they only take up space if you make them available online. We recommend keeping these two high-level folders synced:

• Internal
• JWA Projects

If you need access to the Archive or any other folders, you can always come back and sync them.

Note

When you first set up Dropbox, it needs to install a helper tool to ensure that offline-only sync works correctly. Installation of this helper tool requires admin privileges. For more information on how to grant yourself admin privileges, go to the page on Admin Access in the Knowledgebase.

Microsoft Office

We’ve pre-installed the core applications in the Office suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote). These will need a separate sign in from Microsoft, which you should have received in your work email.

Adobe Creative Cloud

You’ll need to sign in to Adobe Creative Cloud to download the Adobe apps we use (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Acrobat Pro). Open the Creative Cloud app and follow the instructions to sign in. For this one you’ll use your Google Workspace account to sign in.

Installing other apps

We pre-install most of the apps you’ll need to get started, but depending on your position at the firm, you may need to install other programs to do your work.

We’ve curated most of the programs you’ll need and made them available within the Self-Service app. Open up Self-Service and go to Your Apps. Here you’ll find these applications and a number of others.

Browsers

macOS comes with Safari built-in and for most people it does the job. However, if you prefer or would rather work in a different browser, you can install Firefox, Brave, or Edge from within Self-Service. All these browsers are pre-configured with the 1Password extension and an ad-blocker.

Chrome is also available in Self-Service, however, given some changes that Google is making to the experience, we at IT don’t necessarily want to recommend it.

Caution

Use and installation of any browser other than Safari, Firefox, Brave, Edge, or Chrome is not supported.

Tools for Analysts

If you’re an analyst or an intern, you’ll likely need to download and install a specific set of programs to be able to do our analysis. Most of these apps are available within Self-Service under Your Apps and Analysts.

Syncing and final setup

Now that your apps are set up and things are signed in, the last step is to wait. See, Dropbox syncing can take a while, and once you’re done, you then need to wait to save the folders you want available offline. This can take a good amount of time but it can usually just happen in the background.