Ruckus,BYOD & Airwatch

[andyire]

Hi

 

we are looking to upgrade our wireless infrastructure and Ruckus is looking like the front runner after some testing. Before deciding on this as the solotuin I am interesting to find out what experiences people have had with using Ruckus wireless solutions with Airwatch for BYOD iOS deployments. ?

 

Also how are you managing & restricting student access to the WIFI ?

 

Cheers

Andyire

[howartp]

Hi Andyire,

 

We're using Ruckus and Airwatch for our iPads on a lease scheme; we haven't put the BYOD's on because of the exhaustive cost of AirWatch to do so.

 

Works absolutely fine as long as they haven't installed VPN apps - with the VPN active they can't access the Ruckus captive portal to authenticate; unfortunately once authenticated they can then turn the VPN back on again and off they go with unfiltered access.

 

Peter

[andyire]

Hi Peter ,

 

Thanks for your response.

 

It's good to hear that it works well with airwatch. I think we will end up factoring the cost of airwatch into the purchase of iPads but this is not set in stone.

 

When you say you haven't put the BYOD's on to airwatch do you mean additional devices which pupils decide to bring to school I.e their windows laptops or MacBooks?

 

As regards VPN apps.. Would it be possible to prevent the install of VPN apps via Airwatch to stop them circumventing the proxy/filters ?

 

Out of interest how are you managing access to the WIFI? Are you using Radius for BYOD SSID? Or ZeroIT feature?

 

Cheers

Andy

[howartp]

We offered parents choice of BYOD or subscribe to iPad lease scheme. 500 subscribed, 1200 are BYOD'ing. Only the lease iPads are on AirWatch.

 

I haven't found an option to prevent apps being installed yet - you can create a blacklist of apps and create a compliance policy around it which does anything from alerting the user to wiping the device if you contravene it. I set this up this morning to report students to their HOY to deal with.

 

I want to use Radius with our Smoothwall, but ( as per loads of threads on here) that don't work.

 

I'm currently using a shared password on the student WLAN then captive portal to auth each day.

 

Used ZeroIT for BYO mobile access for 12-18 months until we launched iPads before Easter. Works for 99% of iPads, 80% of Android, 10% of Windows Phone and 0% of Blackberry - or something like that. Having said that, I think there's an update in one of the recent updates that might help increase that.

 

Peter

[andyire]

Ah that makes sense . I suspect we will have some how decide not to subscribe. Also some users may decide to bring additional devices such as laptops.

 

It's a shame you can't prevent apps being installed. Could you remove the App Store? Blacklisting apps is a fair workaround .

 

How would you use the smooth wall with the ruckus? The user connects to open SSID and gets redirected to smooth wall captive portal for authentication ?

 

How does the student WLAN and auth each day work?

 

I had heard that ZeroIT was a bit flaky for non iOS stuff would be interesting to see if the update fixes it a little. The supplier I am working with said there were some improvements but unfortunately I am past the testing stage.

 

How have you found Ruckus in your environment? What made you choose Ruckus over other brands?

 

Thanks

Andy