Education - Australia / New Zealand

We wanted to have a section on the Airheads Community that was dedicated to all of our education customers in Australia and New Zealand. This is a forum where you can discuss anything related to mobility in education, ask questions to your peers or share your expereinces using Aruba. We hope that this will become an active and lively forum that will be regularly viewed and contibuted. The local Aruba team will all be keeping an eye on the forum and are always happy to answer any questions.

Best Regards,

Mark Verbloot

Head of Presales - Aruba ANZ

Thanks Mark.  Looking forward to getting in touch with Sydneysiders and other Australia/NZ members for events and local knowledge.

Dane Marcus

Ascham School

Well done Mark.  It will be useful to have a targeted forum where people can share ideas about how they get the best value out of an Aruba WLAN in a New Zealand / Australian Education context.   Personally I would love to see something from any educational institution which is experimenting with Aruba Beacons and the Meridian app.

Thanks Mark,

Craig Harrison

Diocesan School for Girls

We are exploring Aruba as an option to replace our 3yr old HP MSM solution (~200 APs and 2x HA controllers).

I keep hearing that AirHeads is the best wifi forum around,so let's hope it lives up to the hype ;)

Cheers

Sam

Sam, that was our situation 2 years ago (we had HP MSM too).  Went from having about 3-4 helpdesk tickets PER DAY concerning the wireless even though we had consultants and HP themselves in and validated that everything was configured to perform at its best.

Trialled one building with 20 controllerless APs then went with the controller and now have 175 APs.  Zero issues with wireless now and the Aruba support team is second to none.  It also asses account information using Clearpass through to our Palo Alto.

Dane Marcus

Hi Dane,

Thanks for this - I actually met Jennifer Sharman in Canberra last month at the AIS conference and she recounted this experience.

I was particularly impressed with her telling me how easy it was to onboard 1000+ devices using ClearPass.

We use CloudPath currently and, whilst pretty effective, still requires some input for students when it comes to onboarding devices.

TBH- the sooner we get off HP the better (planned Christmas replacement)

Cheers

Sam

Sam,

We have a hands-off policy at Wenona around onboarding and have all our girls connect their own devices each year, the IT Staff don't do it for them. They will assist but they get an angry look from me when they do it for them. Clear-Pass has made this process seemless for us.

We had some issues in the first year with their Java based app and Mac's not likely it but since turning off the Java client it has been pretty much flawless.

We have the odd issue on students constantly onboarding their device and ending up with 30+ certificates in their Keychain and WiFi gets confused of which certificate to use. Though a quick delete of the excess certificates and there good to go again.

Been using ClouthPath for years here at Wenona and wouldn't leave it any time soon, in fact I recently used it to build a Guest Access system which doesn't require a seperate SSID for guests.

We didn't replace a HP Solution though we did replace a Cisco solution in 2014 Christmas break. Has been great, a very solid wireless system (touch wood).

I would highly recommend Aruba... we have 120 AP's and 2 controllers. We have also paired it with CloudPath XpressConnect for onboarding and love it the whole setup.

Hi Sam,

There certainly is a great deal of information on the Airheads community but please feel free to post any questions you may have on this forum if you can't find the answers you are looking for. 

Best Regards,

Mark

@sammcneill Oh the hype is real! This is the place for you.

Like @mverblootmetioned, fire away, any and all questions you have. There are some great engineers in the community that are willing to help.

Great idea Mark. Good to see a dedicated area for Australian customers!

Scott

Thanks Mark. Happy to share any knowledge and experience we have from our many successful Aruba deployments over the years. WiFi is such an exciting area of IT and has evolved so much in the past few years in particular. Looking forward to hearing about others challenges with WiFi in ANZ and learning through their perspectives.

Thanks Mark.

Looking forward to see how this forum develops.

Just upgraded our wirless from Aruba to Aruba, running great!

Mark Humphries

Nossal High School