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Mobile Manager 5.7 builds on Wavelink Corp.s extensive experience managing multivendor WLAN environments, offering improved reporting capabilities and increased hardware support.
Click here to read the full review of Mobile Manager 5.7.
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Mobile Manager 5.7 builds on Wavelink Corp.s extensive experience managing multivendor WLAN environments, offering improved reporting capabilities and increased hardware support.
Companies looking to tighten control over wireless networks will benefit from Mobile Managers strong feature set across hardware platforms. And with this release, Wavelink aims to extend its prowess to next-generation hardware as well.
Mobile Manager 5.7 is available now in a $1,500 Starter Pack that includes the management console, server agents and a 25-access-point license. Additional access point li-censes start at $90 per device, but volume discounts are available. Management consoles and server agents may be installed on as many machines as necessary at no extra charge.
In eWEEK Labs tests, Version 5.7s new health and performance dashboard provided much-improved insight into the performance levels, capacity limits and WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption or radio-frequency transmission errors across the entire wireless network.
Mobile Managers statistical reporting provides a wealth of historical and trending reports, offering insight into network performance over time. These improvements bring Mobile Manager in line with similar features in competing products from AirWave Wireless Inc.
Mobile Manager 5.7 supports the latest generation of wireless hardware, including the majority of enterprise-class access points from vendors such as Cisco Systems Inc., Symbol Technologies Inc., Avaya Inc. and Proxim Corp., among others.
Wavelink is also dipping its toe into the wireless switch pool, offering management capabilities for Symbols WS 5000 Wireless Switch System.
In tests, Mobile Manager ably managed Symbol 4121 and 4131 and Cisco Aironet 340, 350 and 1100 access points distributed across a WAN. We easily created policy templates for each access points hardware platform, defining basic parameters such as wireless network names, broadcast status, radio signal strength, default firmware versions and WEP security parameters.
Mobile Manager can also control advanced features such as mapping network names to virtual LANs and Extensible Authentication Protocol.
We easily pushed policies to managed access points and set the system to auto-correct any future deviations.
For supported firmware versions, Mobile Manager provides a much more scalable management option than the native access point management interfaces. Some features still require the native tools, but WLAN (wireless LAN) management necessities are covered.
For unsupported firmware revisions, Mobile Managers compatibility mode makes a best effort to extend features to the platform—but, again, administrators might need to use native tools.
Technical Analyst Andrew Garcia can be reached at andrew_garcia@ziffdavis.com.
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