Meraki, a San Francisco based tech company, known primarily for their cloud based wireless network hardware and software has recently expanded their product line to include System Mangement software. This software is of course cloud based. So the question becomes: How does this software make my life(as a person in the business of managing systems) easier?

  Here is a brief description:

Meraki's cloud-based centralized management provides unified views of all your devices, including mobile clients connected to third-party networks. With Meraki Systems Manager, administrators can instantly find laptops, desktops or virtual machines based on location, hostname, username or operating system with built-in search capabilities. Meraki Systems Manager operates on all commonly deployed versions of Microsoft Windows, including XP, Vista and Windows 7, as well as Mac OS X versions 10.5 through 10.6

The ability of the mangement agent to be installed via an Active Directory GPO is plus. And once the management agent is installed the reporting provided by Systems Manager includes what software is installed, hardware specs, and performance graphs showing the usage of memory, CPU, swap, and network bandwith.  Another plus is how Systems Manager allows Admins to remotely assist users without logging them out (as in Windows Remote Desktop). Moreover, because Meraki Remote Desktop supports firewall tunneling without any additional setup, allowing Admins to be able to assist users and troubleshoot issues from outside the school network without having to go through the hassle of setting up a VPN or configuring the firewall.

Overall, the only feature missing from the Meraki Systems Manger is support for ios and Android platforms.

http://sm.meraki.com/

You can create an account by following the link above.

The following link is a link to a video with more detailed product features.

http://sm.meraki.com/features.html