Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Tools Ease WLAN Management: Page 3 of 6

Discovery of all the access points on the test network, as well as the network a router-hop away was slightly easier and faster than Wavelink Mobile Manager. Presumably AP discovery need only be performed when new access points are installed and both solutions allow discovery to be scheduled so the task can run after hours.

After discovering the APs in my test bed, it took very little time to set up each AP to be managed by AMP. It was even able to quickly create a logical grouping into which I placed the access points. That eased management for general configuration settings such as extended service set identifier (ESSID) and security settings.

Grouping APs also makes it easier to apply settings profiles, which are preset configurations that can be applied to APs to ensure they are all properly configured. AMP can then routinely push this profile out to APs to compensate for any configuration deviations. Mobile Manager can perform these same functions, but its lack of an intuitive interface, coupled with its convoluted right-click-driven design, makes it a task to configure the server to handle these tasks.

Installation of Wavelink's Mobile Manager 5.7 was simple. The Windows-based application took little more than a double click and entry of a license key to get the server up and running on the test network. Once started, a setup wizard prompted me to input the management credentials of the APs and then it immediately scanned for them.

Slowly but surely, Mobile Manager found and managed all the APs in my test bed. Interestingly, the Intel 2011 AP on my test network, for which support is not offered under Mobile Manager, was recognized as a Cisco switch and I was able to change the device's IP address.