Implementation of the Meraki Dashboard was done by a third party, and then when I took over the job, I just gained access to the dashboard. It was a reseller who implemented the tool and my organization was satisfied with the work the reseller did.

Meraki Dashboard's deployment does not take that long. The solution is deployed on a hybrid cloud in our organization. We have an MX400 control head, which acts as a traffic-shaping firewall-type device control unit. However, the dashboard itself is in the cloud.

Like UniFi or Aruba, you can cloud anywhere as long as you've got that address. You could be 1,000 miles away and still check in and see how your network is doing. You can also do some troubleshooting through the network configuration. The solution is deployed on whatever cloud provider Cisco has.

It took only one person to maintain the solution in a school environment with 18 access points.

We used an integrator which was the vendor's support.

Every time we've deployed it, we've had to employ third parties to do it for us.

I handle the initial setup in-house. I did not need the assistance of other outside individuals such as consultants or integrators. 

Of course, the last time I deployed around 1200 sites and I used a third party.

We do the deployment ourselves.

The first implementation was done using a partner.

I did not configure the product originally. Somebody else did it and they did not configure it very well. For example, there is a feature to protect against ransomware and that feature was not even turned on in the device. After I realized it was not working optimally, I got together with the Meraki folks and they got in there and reconfigured it. It became a true AI device at that point. There were really a lot of things wrong with the initial configuration, but that ransomware piece was a pretty major feature to miss.  

After Meraki helped me reconfigure everything, I felt much more comfortable after that. It was done by one of their resellers and I guess I should have gone that way out of the gate.  

I handled the initial implementation process. 

We used CDW to assist with our implementation and deployment, and our experience was very good.

We used the Meraki team, but beyond that, we didn't get help from anyone else. We installed all the switches and all of the access points.

For the implementation, we ourselves did the POC, but we did have a representative from Meraki here that was guiding us for about a week.

I did the deployment myself.

I was working for an ISP and the ISP mentality is to manage the dashboard and installations. We don't let the customer manage the dashboard unless they have requested to do that specifically, and we do the installations.

If the contact gives us all the information we need, then we can handle the implementation alone.

I cannot recall how long it took to deploy the product.

The APs are pretty easy to deploy so we did not need the assistance of a vendor or consultant. We just got support directly from Meraki is we had any issue.

We handle the implementation for our clients.

We worked directly with the Meraki team.