For most, technology has become a powerful and perhaps even essential tool in our daily lives. Whether it’s having access to a wealth of information at our fingertips, the automatic backup of precious photos, or keyless entry to our cars, we live in an age where technology surrounds us. At Meraki, we’re constantly looking for ways to help our customers simplify IT because we believe every organization should have access to the same technology benefits we already have in our day-to-day lives.
A powerful example are the template capabilities we’ve introduced over the years for our Wireless, Switching and Security products. Templates allow our users to define a single, extensible configuration profile for all their devices, making it possible to then bind each device of a certain type for instant, programmatic, mass configuration:
As you might imagine, this collection of Software Defined Networking (SDN) features is extremely powerful for our customers, but there remained a significant engineering challenge for our team; our customers adopt Meraki as a solution, and in many cases choose multiple product categories for each of their network locations. For example, a retailer may choose to deploy both Meraki Wireless (MR) and Meraki switches (MS) to all 1,200 of their stores. This makes complete sense, and Meraki therefore lets users conveniently combine these individual locations into a single, multi-element network:
Until now, combined networks were not supported by our template capabilities, and therefore required customers to make the restrictive choice between separately-templated, or combined but non-templated networks for management.
Today we are thrilled to announce that our engineering team has solved this complex challenge, allowing customers to now create a single template that is capable of supporting any combination of Meraki technologies. It is no longer necessary to choose a device type when creating a template, therefore making them highly flexible and customizable:
We are very excited about the new capabilities this enhancement offers, and hope that this continues to demonstrate our vision of simplifying IT. To check out combined templates, just sign in to your dashboard account and navigate to Organization > Configuration Templates. For more details about the capabilities of our templates technology, please visit our documentation portal. Thanks to all of you who provided feedback on this, and happy cloud managing!