We’re thrilled to announce that Meraki was honored as one of CRN magazine’s Emerging Vendors for 2012. CRN chose the most innovative companies founded since 2006 that have already started to make waves in enterprise technology. What’s more, we also were named as one of the 25 Coolest Emerging Vendors.
We’ve worked hard to deliver innovative solutions for the enterprise market, so it’s great to be recognized as a leader. Thanks to CRN for the honor!
Check out our profile here and the full list at www.crn.com
Mobile devices play an essential role in many organizations and at Mimeo.com, a leader in the digital printing service industry, iPods are the bloodline and pulse of the company. Today, Shawn Winters, director of Mimeo’s IT Operations, shares his experience of managing the evolution of devices that are at the heart of his business.
Mimeo.com
Mimeo.com is the innovator of online, on-demand document printing and distribution. Mimeo.com is headquartered in New York and has production and sales facilities in Newark, NJ, Memphis, TN, and London, UK. Founded in 1998, Mimeo couples great printing quality with a commitment to manage an immaculate workflow: from last-minute typo edits to distributing the printed document to destinations across the world.
The challenge: a broadening range of devices
Mimeo.com operates over 200,000 square feet of digital print capacity and central to its operations are iPods which are used as scanners. The iPods carry real-time information and touch every single product that leaves Mimeo’s facilities. The information from the iPods is fed into an integrated application used to manage the facility’s inventory, production, and distribution.
The iPods are as integral to Mimeo’s impeccable operation as production workstations, but while Shawn and his team were experienced in managing Windows machines, they are tasked to find a solution to manage iPods as well. Beyond iPods, some Mimeo employees are using Mac devices, thus further increasing the need for Shawn to find a comprehensive solution for all their devices. Shawn recalled, “We’ve grown as a company. We have new devices and our needs have changed, but we have not kept up with managing our devices.”
Management under a single pane of glass
Mimeo was impressed with Meraki’s cloud-based architecture, which enables fast deployment of a device management solution — Mimeo’s Systems Manager network scaled to more than 500 devices in 2 weeks. The ability to manage PCs, Macs, and iOS devices under a single pane-of-glass changed Shawn’s perspectives on managing devices, “I have so much visibility with Systems Manager, it makes me want to look at the dashboard. It was easy and convenient to manage all types of devices that we have, Mimeo is back on track.” Mimeo continued to broaden its range of devices and has deployed iPhones, and iPads to its employees. Its inventory management features enable Shawn to monitor unauthorized app or software installation, as well as manage software or driver version control efforts.
iPods across the globe
The visibility of the device location feature is also helpful to Mimeo’s geographically distributed locations. “We ship devices from one production facility to another. With Systems Manager, we can see which facility each device is in and keep an eye out for devices that walk off our sites.” Lastly, Shawn and his team use Systems Manager on a daily basis for troubleshooting and inventory management. “I have incredible information and this is crucial to our business. I can drill down to a device’s diagnostic information — see which access point it is connected to, which SSID, signal strength, and even battery level at a point in time. Systems Manager provides instantaneous information of all our devices and you can’t get this visibility in any other systems.”
To start a free trial, simply fill out a short form on our trial page. You’ll then be redirected to your new Systems Manager network, and you’ll immediately be able to start adding managed devices.
We recently had a number of our customers in HQ to spend some time with our staff and discuss their needs and what Meraki can do for them. We took the opportunity to do a series of short videos with each customer, and will be posting them over the next few weeks.
First off is Dirk DeLo, the CTO at Avenues, a new K-12 school opening in New York. Dirk is deploying a new network to support multiple-devices-per-student using Meraki:
How-to videos are great when you are trying something new and getting your feet off the ground. That’s why we launched a series of how-to videos on YouTube to help you get started with Meraki’s Systems Manager, our free cloud-based mobile device management platform. They’re under five minutes and focused on specific topics to get you off and running with Systems Manager.
1. Getting started with Meraki Systems Manager (04:23 mins)
If you are completely new to Systems Manager, you can take a couple minutes to watch this video. We’ll show you how to get a Systems Manager account, set up your Systems Manager dashboard, and enroll PCs, Macs and iOS devices into your network.
2. Managing iOS devices with Meraki Systems Manager (04:10 mins)
For those of you with iPads, iPods, and iPhones, take a look at how Systems Manager can help you track and manage, enforce restrictions, and deploy apps to iOS devices.
3. How to deploy apps to iOS devices with Meraki Systems Manager (02:52 mins)
Systems Manager is integrated with the Apple App Store and the Apple Volume Purchase Program (VPP). We take a detailed look at how to deploy free and paid apps to iOS devices in this video.
We will continue to add more how-to videos, so keep an eye and subscribe to Meraki’s YouTube channel. Lastly, if you have suggestions or ideas for future videos, please leave us a comment below. Enjoy the videos and have fun with Systems Manager!
Since Meraki is providing free gear for awesome events such as this week’s Startup Riot Seattle and gdgt live after that, we thought it was a great opportunity to highlight our Free Event WiFi program that we’ve been running for the past couple years.
For whatever reason, event WiFi can be less than satisfying. The irony is that more often than not, the tech events with the most tech-savvy folk in attendance are the ones that end up having WiFi problems. We generally hear that the WiFi networks are difficult to set up, overloaded, and usually require passwords that the event attendees never get.
Meraki can give you both — for free. The Meraki Free Event WiFi program enables us to lend out our enterprise-grade WiFi equipment for meetups, startup weekends, and hackathons.
You provide the Internet connection, and we provide no-hassle WiFi for your event. The gear arrives pre-configured, with a single page of setup instructions, and you basically forget all about it. Once the event is over, you return the gear to us, give us feedback on how flawless your event WiFi was, tweet about it, and share this program with your friends.
As mentioned, we provided event WiFi for Startup Riot Seattle. After Sanjay used our gear for Startup Riot Atlanta [pictured above], he contacted us again for the Seattle event. Borrowing APs through Meraki Free Event WiFi is a great option for event organizers who have events that require a lot of WiFi bandwidth for just a couple days each year.
Last month, we provided Free Event WiFi to Derrick for his first ever Educational Technology Conference and his Meraki experience was pretty typical. He told us, “Everything went swimmingly. Our network admin was very impressed with the management console.”
A couple weekends ago, we supplemented Change.org’s existing Meraki network with some of our Free Event WiFi gear for their Hack for Change event.
After a successful turnout of 150+ attendees, Ben at Change.org told us that it “was really great to not have to worry about wifi!! It was fantastic and very much appreciated. Keep on doing what you do!!”
