quote:

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Originally posted by PhilC
So's Linksys, but they're useless also!

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So's Linksys, but they're useless also!

Its a Cisco AP though ;)

I work in the WiFi industry also. I visit customer sites all the time who have taken advantage of the 'free' AP. The best bit is, if you tell them it's broken, their response seems to be "put it in the bin, well send you another".

What the hell are you paying the $600 for then!!??

Sorry to go slightly off topic. :)

Oh don't get me wrong I love a freebie....

However have you seen the requirements -

Attend the webinar in its entirety
Enter a valid company name
Be an IT professional
Register with a shipping address in the US, Canada, or the European Economic Area. We cannot ship free APs outside of these regions, and cannot ship to post office boxes.
European Economic Zone countries: a valid VAT ID is required for shipment.
Register with their organization's email address
Confirm eligibility and shipping address with a Meraki representative by phone
If you are unable to accept your AP due to restrictions, (e.g. Erate), we will be happy to provide you with a trial AP, which can be returned following your evaluation of our solution

I don't like the last sentence, plus you know you'll have to jump through hoops. And to be honest, I don't particularly want a Meraki AP or their software :lol:

Free AP for 'attending' a free webinar? You're right, it's completely ridiculous :o:lol:

Exactly Phil, this was the link I recieved - http://meraki.com/lp/free-ap?region=us

Rediculous or what eh !

LOL at Meraki's free AP webinar thing.

A couple of vendors do this. Makes a bit of a joke of the quote they send you a few months later when they're asking upwards of $600 for them. Not worth much if they're giving them away!

Had a play with Meraki, and i'm not sold. Yeah its free, but its clunky and not as nice as 3CX.

So think 3CX will be the tool of choice going forward (www.mobiledevicemanager.com)

Thanks for your input guys.

most likely :lol: but if they alrewady have vodaofne (or whoever really) contracts then might be able tot ack it on

Fixmo is another i was recommended which apparently allows for personal/work data separation, although my project was cancelled before i really looked into it.

Is Meraki still free? If it is then it might be worth persisting with it, especially if you have zero budget as all other solutions are going to come with reasonably large monthly costs.

Edit - Be interesting to hear what Vodafone's service costs; i suspect it'll a fair amount more than the likes of AirWatch or Intune :lol:

[Edited on 20-03-2013 by Dom]

I've come across Meraki and spoken to a sales rep who wasn't all that helpful, just wanted to give me a free Wireless AP and attend a webinar.

Will have a look at ZDM robbo thanks.

At the moment I'm trialing 3CX for location/application control/security policy and wipe which is a free cloud based system. Although would require the sales reps to "log in" initially which if they didn't do they'd have free reign over the phone. As its all policy based, it will lend itself nicely to a BYOD piece I'm sure we will be trialling later in the year so its making me swing towards it.

For the exchange side, I've gone down the Active Sync route. We have a few different handsets and for cost reasons (and outstanding battery length) wanted to go down the Acer Liquid Z1 route although for whatever reason it can't connect to our exchange server however the HTC's can :boggle: Same mail apps, same OS, the Acer's just will not connect :boggle:

IOS side is more tricky as 3CX requires apple certificates so will probably rely on exchange rules for security and wiping.

Free-wise you've Exchange/Activesyc, although it doesn't offer all of the features you're after (app control etc), and Meraki (if it's still free) and SimpleMDM is currently free (no idea of features). And if you don't mind manually provisioning the devices then look at Apple's iPCU.

Otherwise have a look at Microsoft's Intune, it's one of the cheapest MDM's i've seen (iirc it's around £4 per user per month).

Worth having a read of http://enterpriseios.com as well.

Edit - Note that iOS can't be 100% lockdown (certainly wasn't the case when i was looking at this last year) as users can remove the MDM profile.

[Edited on 20-03-2013 by Dom]

we use our own called ZDM for ours. We offer pretty good services like that to small businesses for a not a lot of money, worth lookign into

We are after a piece of MDM software, requirements are:

Must support Android and IOS
Must give full control to wipe devices remotely, control installations, websites viewable all through policy control rather than per individual device

Preferable would be to be able to integrate into a windows environment, authenticate using AD, access exchange, although this isn't a deal breaker
Also preferable is geo-location for tracking stolen or lost devices but again not a deal breaker


Currently looked at MobileIron which is good but costs too much, Soti I couldn't get my head around.

I've got Gartners magic quadrant for MDM software so will have a look at Sybase, Good, Airwatch, Zenprise etc, however all these from first research are expensive or require a minimum subscription of more devices than we have (54). They also seem to be able to do much more than we require !

I've got a very small, almost non existent budget so ideally would love to find something free or one off payment that will do the simple bits we need.

Any recommendations before I get into this too deep ?