Affordable MDM solution with room to improve
Updated September 13, 2019
Affordable MDM solution with room to improve
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus
We needed a solution to manage all of our 200+ company cell phones. We were using a competing application, but the cost could not justify the features we required. ManageEngine MDM Plus not only came in at the right price point but had a feature set that included most of what we wanted and little of what we didn't need. We currently use the application to geo track devices, content filtering, and manage mobile applications.
- Geo tracking: once the mobile app is installed, the phone checks in to our cloud management console and we can ping the location of the device easily.
- Lost/stolen device: when a device is lost or stolen, we can make the phone make a sounds to help in finding it or perform a complete wipe to remove any sensitive data.
- App management: they make it easy to add mobile apps that can automatically be pushed out to all of the managed devices. It is easy to control what apps you want to have immediately installed, apps you want to make available, or apps you want to block.
- Email enrollment: the e-mail enrollment option for devices is inconsistent, and this is an area that would seem like an easy fix. In most of the cases where we've tried to enroll devices via email, the text is incredibly small and the hyperlinks are either not visible or not easily clickable unless you zoom in a lot. When requiring staff the enroll their own device, you essentially have to rely on the SMS enrollment option.
- SMS enrollment credits: the option for SMS enrollment actually works great. However, where it needs to be improved is how the credits are provisioned. There is no way to actually purchase additional credits. When you first sign up for ManageEngine MDM Plus, you are given a set amount of credits. Once those run out, it is a huge pain to try to obtain more. It should be possible to be able to simply order additional credits.
- Management console interface: the management console has a lot of excellent features, but the design has a lot of room for improvement. The navigation menus are a little confusing. For example, areas for enrollment, inventory, and device management all have lists of managed devices, but each has different information. It should be easy to simply click on a device and tell whether it's already been enrolled, etc. without the need for jumping around separate pages.
- Client user management: when you enroll a device via an end-user, you must add a user ID and email address. If you ever want to update those, you can't. Further, you can't seem to be able to delete users altogether. When employees leave and new ones are hired, phone numbers tend to get flipped around. This has caused a few headaches in enrolling/removing devices.
- Positive: we've been able to locate lost devices. Even finding just 1 or 2 devices saves a few hundred dollars for us in equipment replacement costs.
- Negative: have end-users enroll their devices has not been a very smooth process. It has taken a lot of patience and time on the IT side. Out of our about 200 devices, it has taken us about 4 months with two staff working to enroll devices.
MaaS360 is very comparable and was the solution we had in place prior to moving to ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus. I've also used MaaS360 at a prior position, and it does work fairly well. I believe they have very similar feature sets (at least what I recall from last using MaaS360), but ultimately for us, it came down to the price point.
Using ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus
200 - We have roughly 200 staff members in all different departments that have a company-issued cell phone. These users range from corporate management, sales, to equipment technicians. All company phones have the ManageEngine MDM application installed, which is managed by 3 IT staff members.
3 - Our IT department manages the application. To manage the solution an intermediate knowledge of cell phone/other mobile devices is necessary, as well as an understanding of other networking concepts (in order to set up device profiles).
- Device location.
- Remote wipe/reset.
- Manage applications.
- There are ways to integrate with manufacturers to make the enrollment process much more convenient and less involved (such as KNOX Mobile Enrollment and Google Zero Touch) that we are considering.