Cisco Meraki SM vs. Scalefusion

It is very helpful if you need to restrict the apps a student or employee can have on their device. I had teachers using Netflix on the iPads before I brought them under management. Restricting them will make you unpopular with some of your employees, however, I advise them the device is being provided for business use and, therefore we have the right and responsibility to manage it.

Incentivized

There a few things I wish I knew before committing to this software. 1. If you plan to track locations of devices then it drains battery life of phones quickly, I had to reduce the location ping to every 15 minutes to mitigate the poor battery performance. 2. The built in mapping on the Scalefusion site is not very useful, you can only map one device at a time. I had to write an app to map all the devices onto one map. I offered to sell them my map, they did not reply and have since copied it, so now they have group mapping but it is not as good as mine. (no satellite view options and does not use google maps)

• We can create templates for our mobile devices that make new hardware deployments a breeze.
• Pushing out new with Apple Business Manager is easy and efficient.
• We get tons of real-time information on our devices and useful historical information and logs.
• Kiosk and Single App mode is great for single purpose tablets.

Incentivized

• Working on cloud. No physical device needed.
• Supports big number of devices.

Incentivized

• Limited ability for "command line" functions. For example, we had a laptop that was stolen and showed to be online, but we could not wipe it. We were able to access a command prompt, but it would not accept DISKPART or FORMAT commands to try and make the PC unusable.
• The GPS location is not terribly accurate and frequently it "guesses" location based off of an IP address rather than actually activating the GPS on the device. This makes tracking lost/stolen devices very difficult.
• Difficulty getting devices to correctly show their status in the dashboard. For example, I can have a PC that is online and connected to the Internet, but shows to be offline in the dashboard. Only after refreshing many times would it indicate that the PC was actually online, thus allowing me to administer it.

Incentivized

• battery life of phones is dramatically affected if location is used

We need this type of software, Scalefusion although clunky, it does function. And their prices are good compared to the competition. Note I have not tried the competitions software, just looked at their prices.

It has is easy to use overall and is very powerful. The learning curve for the system is very small and I have found it easy to train members of our team to use it. It can fit any size organization and the support is excellent. The ROI is well worth it. If you have a multiplatform ecosystem, this tool is near perfect.

Incentivized

Installation is easy. There is a steep learning curve of what the software can and cannot do. It is also quite comprehensive, so the is much to absorb. The user interface is not intuitive, many setting are buried very deep.

We have found that Cisco Meraki has always had very good customer support. In the rare case, when we have needed assistance they have always been quick to respond and solve the issue.

Incentivized

The support is quite good, usually you can get a response answer within an hour, however many issues take quite a while to resolve.

The only product I have used that is similar is Apple Configurator. While a powerful solution, it requires physical access to the devices which is not always possible, especially on a large site. Meraki is able to achieve many of the same functions as the Apple configurator but without ever needing to physically access the device, other than initial setup and registration.

Incentivized

It’s scalable up to a point and will scale well from small to a medium business, however, as a business grows and policies get more mature or detailed, you might have to later upgrade to a more appropriate enterprise solution such as MaaS360 or AirWatch. This solution however, will last quite a long tome for a growing business.

Incentivized

• Our immediate take away has been a savings of thousands a year in MDM fees. We were paying around $3.00 a device with our previous MDM and our average with Meraki is about $1.88 per device. That while providing far more functionality than our previous provider.

Incentivized

• Once we set up our device through Scalefusion we manage our devices from end to end. That's why it's cost friendly and easy to manage our environment.

Incentivized