Mobile devices play an essential role in many organizations and at Mimeo.com, a leader in the digital printing service industry, iPods are the bloodline and pulse of the company. Today, Shawn Winters, director of Mimeo’s IT Operations, shares his experience of managing the evolution of devices that are at the heart of his business.
Mimeo.com
Mimeo.com is the innovator of online, on-demand document printing and distribution. Mimeo.com is headquartered in New York and has production and sales facilities in Newark, NJ, Memphis, TN, and London, UK. Founded in 1998, Mimeo couples great printing quality with a commitment to manage an immaculate workflow: from last-minute typo edits to distributing the printed document to destinations across the world.
The challenge: a broadening range of devices
Mimeo.com operates over 200,000 square feet of digital print capacity and central to its operations are iPods which are used as scanners. The iPods carry real-time information and touch every single product that leaves Mimeo’s facilities. The information from the iPods is fed into an integrated application used to manage the facility’s inventory, production, and distribution.
The iPods are as integral to Mimeo’s impeccable operation as production workstations, but while Shawn and his team were experienced in managing Windows machines, they are tasked to find a solution to manage iPods as well. Beyond iPods, some Mimeo employees are using Mac devices, thus further increasing the need for Shawn to find a comprehensive solution for all their devices. Shawn recalled, “We’ve grown as a company. We have new devices and our needs have changed, but we have not kept up with managing our devices.”
Management under a single pane of glass
Mimeo was impressed with Meraki’s cloud-based architecture, which enables fast deployment of a device management solution — Mimeo’s Systems Manager network scaled to more than 500 devices in 2 weeks. The ability to manage PCs, Macs, and iOS devices under a single pane-of-glass changed Shawn’s perspectives on managing devices, “I have so much visibility with Systems Manager, it makes me want to look at the dashboard. It was easy and convenient to manage all types of devices that we have, Mimeo is back on track.” Mimeo continued to broaden its range of devices and has deployed iPhones, and iPads to its employees. Its inventory management features enable Shawn to monitor unauthorized app or software installation, as well as manage software or driver version control efforts.
iPods across the globe
The visibility of the device location feature is also helpful to Mimeo’s geographically distributed locations. “We ship devices from one production facility to another. With Systems Manager, we can see which facility each device is in and keep an eye out for devices that walk off our sites.” Lastly, Shawn and his team use Systems Manager on a daily basis for troubleshooting and inventory management. “I have incredible information and this is crucial to our business. I can drill down to a device’s diagnostic information — see which access point it is connected to, which SSID, signal strength, and even battery level at a point in time. Systems Manager provides instantaneous information of all our devices and you can’t get this visibility in any other systems.”
Systems Manager is free for any organization. To get started, simply fill out a short form on our signup page. You’ll then be redirected to your new Systems Manager network, and you’ll immediately be able to start adding managed devices.
