The Meraki team has a north star we’re always aiming toward: simplifying the IT experience. These words make a great tagline, and indeed they are the essence of our mission statement. Putting this mantra into practice is easier said than done in the tech world, where new features are constantly vying for attention. The reality is a continual tension between feature richness and simplicity, a line we walk every day at Meraki.
Our Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solution, Systems Manager, provides IT administrators with rich and powerful control over the managed devices entering their environment – be they organization-owned or employee-owned. The many operating systems covered by this solution are continually evolving and adding new features themselves, so inevitably the number of levers and knobs available in Systems Manager to control them all also grows.
The good news is that while IT departments may need all these controls at their fingertips, this isn’t true of all Systems Manager users. A classroom teacher, for example, may only need a subset of tools, enabling control over the devices in use within their own class. If a simpler tool could be provided, focused on the essentials for device and app management, this could reduce the number of calls to IT.
Enter Systems Manager Self Service Portal. Let’s call it the SSP.
The SSP is perfect for two groups of users: those looking for a clean, simple interface through which to manage the essentials for a small numbers of devices, and the end users of those devices themselves. Starting with the former, the SSP prioritizes efficiency with a thoughtfully designed, streamlined interface.
Here we can see the tools our customers tell us they use most frequently, both for managing the devices themselves, and the apps they are running.
End users of managed devices can also benefit from the SSP by using the portal to install apps when permitted to do so. In addition, end users can use the tool to see what their IT administrators are able to do with, and see on, the device they’re using. This provides greater confidence and transparency over whatever data or information they access or share through the devices they’re using.
We believe Meraki is more than just a product, it’s an experience, and the best way to get a feel for the new interface is to take it for a test drive. For more details, and to set the SSP up, take a look at the dedicated documentation page. As ever, we love to hear our customers’ feedback, so please let us know your thoughts on the new tool, either on twitter or in the new Meraki Community.
