Over the past few years, we’ve seen an increasing trend toward using mobile devices in classrooms. As a key learning platform, this implementation of technology is positioned to have a significant effect on the future of the K-12 environment. In an effort to prepare districts for deployments, we hosted two special webinars: in the first, Eric Curts from North Canton City Schools shared tips on optimizing your district’s network, while the second covered strategies for iOS deployment models and device management, restrictions, and more.
Providing Secure BYOD at North Canton City Schools
Eric Curts, Technology Director at North Canton City Schools, joined us to share how he is using the Meraki solution to support BYOD, as well as school-issued tablets and desktops across 7 schools. By using custom L3/L7 firewall rules, L7 traffic shaping, and device policies, he created a secure network ensuring safe browsing and bandwidth prioritization for educational applications.
See how easy it is for Eric to manage his network on the fly and support a growing mobile device initiative.
The Ultimate Guide to iOS Deployments for K-12
When preparing your school’s network to handle iOS device deployments, you have options! We’ve created a great deployment guide outlining strategies and tips for successfully supporting and managing content on these devices, including supervising devices, managing restrictions, deploying apps, and more.
Whether student-owned or school-owned, check out the Solutions Guide for detailed information and ownership models and look for upcoming webinars where we’ll take a deep dive into deployments.
Last week, we had several great webinars highlighting Meraki products in action. From Retail to K-12 to Healthcare, we showed how you can use granular analytics to improve business, leverage your switches to do more for you, and gain six-figure cost savings with wireless and security appliances.
Enabling the Next Generation Retail Experience with Dynamic Analytics
Deep visibility into the users, devices, and applications on your network gives you insight into not only who is accessing your business’ network, but how they’re using it. We showed you some of the innovative ways you can create a smarter shopping experience by using your network to turn potential clients into loyal, repeat customers and improve customer experience.
Check out the video to learn how to increase conversion rates, drive store visits with targeted offers to mobile devices, increase foot traffic, integrate network sign-on with your CRM, and much more.
Your School’s Switch Should Do More Than Just Switch
Keep your school’s network ahead of the curve by making your switches work harder for you. In this webinar, we worked through many common problems that K-12 IT teams face daily and showed how simple they were to troubleshoot with Meraki’s intuitive cloud-managed switches.
Find out how you can easily monitor the use of your network, manage settings on the fly, and spend more time on what’s really important.
A Case Study: ABHOW’s Path to Six-Figure Savings
Chris Franks, Corporate Network Manager at American Baptist Homes of the West, shared his experiences easily managing a distributed network of 43 senior living communities across 4 states, supporting 5,000+ residents. With Meraki wireless APs and security appliances, Chris has created a more efficient and scalable network thanks to features like Layer 7 traffic analysis, site-to-site VPN, and WAN optimization.
See how simple it is for Chris to gain complete control over his network while he saves hundreds of thousands of dollars by replacing MPLS and using Meraki devices.
Join us tomorrow as we host Matthias Goodman, IT Director of Drs. Goodman & Partridge, OB/GYN, who will share how he uses Meraki’s cloud-managed wireless APs, switches, and security appliances to support his practice’s 30% YOY growth.
Find out how Matthias is able to take advantage of Meraki’s web-based dashboard to manage traffic and enable secure guest access across 15 locations, with zero onsite configuration.
Sign up now for HIPAA-Compliant Networking Supports EMR at Multi-site Physicians Practice. We’ll see you at 9 am PST tomorrow!
Last month we announced our new Traffic Shaper feature and gave administrators unprecedented visibility into the wireless traffic on their network, providing the ability to see what might be bogging down their network, be it YouTube, BitTorrent or too many users uploading pictures to Facebook. Now, with the new Traffic Shaper page in Dashboard, administrators finally have the tools to not only see what kinds of recreational applications are taking over their network but to do something about it!
Administrators can now create application-specific shaping policies for total control over their wireless bandwidth. Let’s say your Sales team needs snappy access to Salesforce.com at all times, but most of Engineering is streaming World Series games and consuming all of your bandwidth. With Traffic Shaper, shaping policies can be created that apply per user bandwidth limits for specific applications such as video streaming sites, as well as apply QoS priority levels at both Layer 2 and 3 to make sure your Salesforce traffic gets prioritized across the network.
To make setting up new shaping policies fast and simple, we have created pre-defined groups of applications that administrators most commonly want to shape:
Administrators can also create more specific policies for particular applications using HTTP hostnames (eg. salesforce.com), IP and port numbers. Here is an example of a typical shaping policy that you would see in an office setting:
In this example, a rule has been created to apply a 1 Mbps bandwidth limit to all users on the Meraki-Corp SSID for Peer-to-Peer and streaming video and music applications. A second rule has also been created to provide Layer 3 QoS prioritization to applications that are critical to this business, Salesforce.com and Dropbox.com, as well as to provide unlimited bandwidth to these applications.
Since Traffic Shaper can leverage the intelligence of over 16,000 customer networks through the Meraki Cloud Controller, Traffic Shaper’s database of application signatures is always updated. As new P2P and social media applications appear on the scene, they will be quickly fingerprinted and added to the Cloud Controller database for our customer networks so that administrators are never caught unaware by the next BitTorrent.
Traffic Shaper can now be found under the Configure tab in Dashboard. If you are interested in learning more about how Traffic Shaper works, we invite you to join us for a webinar that we’ll be conducting about Traffic Shaper on November 2nd. Details can be found here:
We’re excited to kick off the new year with a new webinar series. Over the next eight weeks, we will be discussing a variety of wireless topics – from enabling guest access to debugging client connectivity issues and more. We are particularly looking forward to giving each attendee a FREE Meraki Indoor access point with a 3-year Enterprise Cloud Controller license (a $450 value!).
We’ll have sessions every two weeks, covering the following subjects:
Deploying Guest Wireless Access
Multi-site Wireless Management and Remote Help Desk
Wireless Authentication
Upgrading to 802.11n
Our first session – on deploying guest wireless access – kicks off next Wednesday, January 13. Guests increasingly expect wireless Internet access when they visit your organization, be it an office, campus or other facility. Learn how to get set up painlessly and inexpensively, as we discuss the requirements and options for guest wireless systems, including tips for deployment with minimal expense and complexity.
Sign up for next Wednesday’s webinar here (Update: if you want to sign up for upcoming webinars, go here), and check out the complete schedule below:
We’re excited to kick off the new year with a new webinar series. Over the next eight weeks, we will be discussing a variety of