Last week, Westmont College was named to the prestigious InfoWorld 100 list.  InfoWorld 100 recognizes IT organizations that “implemented and integrated technologies in innovative ways in pursuit of concrete business goals.”

Westmont is a top-tier liberal arts college in Santa Barbara, California.  One of seven colleges and universities named to the InfoWorld 100, Westmont was recognized for transforming its IT infrastructure into a cloud-centric one.  This project integrated cloud services from Google, Postini, and Salesforce.com, as well as a campus-wide Meraki 802.11n network.  In implementing Meraki, Westmont became both one of the first universities to deploy 802.11n campus-wide, and to deploy a cloud-controlled wireless LAN.

We were thrilled when Westmont chose Meraki (especially after a thorough bakeoff with Cisco and Aruba!) and we’re just as excited to see them recognized publicly for their vision and execution.  And we’d be remiss not to congratulate Novacoast, an IT professional services firm and one of our close partners, who managed the installation.

If you’re curious about Westmont’s experience with Meraki, you can check out our Cloud Controller Tour that features Westmont’s network, and watch a short interview with their CIO, Reed Sheard.  Read about Westmont and the other InfoWorld 100 winners here.

Once again, congrats to the Westmont team!

- Posted by Kiren Sekar

We want Meraki Dashboard to be the most functional, intuitive, and beautiful network administration system available. As of today, you can check out Dashboard’s next evolutionary step: a new layout, and new functionality, that organizes Dashboard’s appearance, makes some common tasks easier, and adds power to common pages.

The new features include:

• More of your screen real estate is used for content—for instance, maps are bigger.
• Go between pages with one click by hovering over the left-hand “tabs.” (They aren’t really tabs any more; we’ve been calling them “pills,” but you can probably come up with something better!)

• Use checkboxes on the access points page to act on many access points at once.
• Shift-click markers on the maps page to select multiple access points, then drag them as a group. Adding access points to Enterprise Edition custom maps is also easier.

We’ll be adding even more in the coming weeks. The new interface is beta for now—click the “Test drive” link in the upper right to try it out. And as always, let us know what you think!

- Posted by Eddie Kohler

On February 4, 2007, Meraki was featured in the Business section of the New York Times in an article titled Wireless Internet for All, Without the Towers. Technology columnist Randall Stross does a great job of explaining how Meraki’s new, grassroots approach to wireless Internet access makes free or low-cost access possible all over the world.

We’re excited to hear that there’s so much interest in Meraki’s technology and upcoming products. Readers who would like to learn more are welcome to sign up for an e-mail update when we launch in a few weeks. We’re still accepting beta customers as well, so if you already know what our system can do, send an e-mail to beta@meraki.net to get started!

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