Cisco offers Meraki Systems Manager (SM), an enterprise mobility management platform supporting the monitoring, provisioning and securing of mobile devices across an enterprise network.
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Ivanti Endpoint Manager
Score 6.9 out of 10
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Ivanti Endpoint Manager increases user and IT productivity by helping IT administrators gather detailed device data, automate software and OS deployments, and quickly fix user issues.
The free tier of Meraki SM was excellent and we used it for a few years. We now use the paid version. Meraki SM is excellent for schools that need to manage large amounts of iPads without needing to maintain physical contact with them. We are a small primary school on a single site however Meraki SM is able to handle larger sites. Devices are able to be configured so that the permissions are automatically set depending on the current user, or the current location. This allows for excellent customization. In my experience, Meraki SM works best when used with iPads. It does have some features for managing other devices but I have not used it for this.
You need to push O365 or some product out to your institution. If you need to build out a reboot before and after and maybe something else, [Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] can easily do that for you. It then can also use a query to determine who needs that product in your environment and then continue using that query to watch for the machines you targeted to show up once your push succeeded. If you need to, you can use the task scheduler and schedule your software distribution for a specific not in normal business hours or on a weekend.
Software distribution - the ability to sit and provide software when a machine calls home works phenomenally well. You may also target based on certain conditions, ranging from LDAP queries down to hardware revisions of individual components.
Operating system provisioning - the range of choice in sequential execution is second to none. We migrated from MDT to Ivanti's providing with relative ease.
Patching and compliance - you're able to get extremely granular, and the rollout project templates make rolling it a particular patch from QA to Production an automated breeze
Currently the application addition to Meraki has gone through some changes that make it not as user friendly as it used to be but has improved some areas of the function such as easy of deployment.
It would be nice to have the ability to reset a users password from the control panel. This function is currently missing.
Some of the navigation within the panel is not the best. It is a little obscure at times where you need to go for certain functions. For instance, to manage users, instead of a nav feature just saying, Manager Users, you have to know to click on a link simply called, "General". This could be improved.
Mac support - While it's the best I've seen with cross platform support, that doesn't mean they don't have a long way to go to catch up with the functionality of other tools that focus on one specific platform.
Product coherence - Their core product, the management suite, is great but with every new acquisition the company makes, it seems like there's another product that gets shoehorned into the picture. Making all those disparate pieces work smoothly together is something they're still working on.
Documentation - They come out with a lot of great features but some are so complicated I couldn't begin to understand the various facets of it all. I realize the days of published manual are long gone but even a PDF covering the major components in detail would be better than having to bump around in the dark until you have to call support for help.
Software Licensing Management - Every major release seems to completely rewrite this tool but they keep seeming to miss the mark. Lately it's a Microsoft Silverlight program that's very slow and has way too much data to be useful.
Web Console - The web console is all but unusable. The only way to really work on administration is to use the 32bit console which is great if you're running Windows but a fully featured web console would be much preferred.
As Microsoft evolves Intune, SCCM, MECM and combines their features into the MS EULA, Ivanti seems to be going the opposite where they are stripping out core products in favor of an EULA + A la cart pricing model that simply is more expensive than Microsoft's pricing. A few years ago, the gap was large enough to justify the extra cost of Ivanti, today the gap has closed significantly enough that the value add just isn't there for us.
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.
Items are logically laid out and most are easy to find. The more advanced stuff can be trickier, but it is still not hard to find. There are a lot of options though, so remembering where some settings are, especially if you do not alter them often, can take a minute, but you will get to them fairly qiickly.
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.
TRM\TAM support has been generally very good. Getting reported bug fixes, design changes, UX problems resolved has been a pain. It is often difficult to get problems escalated beyond the TRM\TAM level. Support is fantastic when you can get it, getting it can often require more work than it should, and that is probably our biggest issue.
I used TechPilot to manage mobile devices which was a great product and had some useful features. I say had, because after it was purchased by Securly the software support and functionary went downhill fast. Securly MDM is an inferior product.
Better in most all categories. On-prem was not an issue for my organization. MS SCCM was lacking features. Airwatch required increasing tiers of service in order to match [Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] features, and lacked the robust inventory data we needed. Meraki was very simple to use, but did not meet our needs. I would say that most Airwatch customers aren't using all the features they are paying for, and could save lots of money by using Meraki instead.
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.
It has come in handy several times, especially when it comes to remotely wiping a device that was lost or stolen.
This has allowed us to push applications to devices, which helps our employees to have easy access to tools related to Healthcare and Business Expense tracking.
Meraki Systems Manager is excellent at allowing us to remotely administer our wireless access points, but has been a source of frustration (at times) when trying to use as an MDM solution.
Centralized IT - all in one solution that is better in some areas than traditional niche software applications. You'll probably still spend the same amount of time with users on the HD line, but you'll be able to reduce the amount of time it takes for auxiliary Help Desk tasks (ticketing, reporting, background deployment, etc.)
Cost - This is a negative of course ;) But at some point you can save some money if you ditch SCCM or your other CRM
