Introducing Fleetsmith Intelligence, the world’s first free device intel product

by Zack Blum, Jesse Endahl, and Kenneth Kouot

Real-time fleet intelligence is the foundation of modern IT. No matter how large or complex a company is, it’s impossible to direct resources efficiently or respond to challenges effectively without knowing the current state of each employee’s devices.

Yet today, that level of visibility is far from universal. At many companies, device inventory information is stored in a seldom-updated spreadsheet — hardly a reliable source for something so important. At others, detailed fleet intelligence information isn’t available in real time or there are serious gaps in the data collected.

It doesn’t need to be this way. We think every company, no matter the size, should know the status of the devices its business depends upon. Fleet intelligence is too important to be the sole domain of big corporations with massive IT teams and budgets.

That’s why we’re making it free.

Fleetsmith Intelligence

Today, we’re announcing Fleetsmith Intelligence, the industry’s first free, hosted fleet intelligence product, and the first to support Apple’s Device Enrollment Program (DEP). Apple admins can deploy Fleetsmith Intelligence to their entire fleet at absolutely no cost — we don’t even require a credit card number. Once deployed, Fleetsmith Intelligence provides real-time answers to crucial security and compliance questions: OS version, firewall status, FileVault encryption status, remaining hard drive space, battery health, and more.

We believe that a partially deployed intelligence product isn’t good enough to provide anything more than a false sense of security — it only takes one insecure or non-compliant device to cause a breach or fail an audit. So to make deployment across the entire fleet easy, we decided to do something radical and include automatic device enrollment (via DEP) in Fleetsmith Intelligence. That makes Fleetsmith Intelligence the first free product to support automatic device setup with:

• Enrollment via Apple’s Device Enrollment Program (DEP)
• Automatic macOS account creation using Fleetsmith’s G Suite and Office 365 integrations
• Customization of the screens shown by Apple’s setup assistant

And we’re just getting started. We’re continuing to invest heavily in Fleetsmith Intelligence, so you can expect even more functionality in the coming weeks and months.

Fleetsmith Managed

Surfacing issues across your fleet is important. So if real-time intelligence satisfies your needs, you’re welcome to use Fleetsmith Intelligence on its own.

But we suspect that once you spot something with Fleetsmith, you’ll want an easy way to address it. That’s why Fleetsmith Intelligence devices can be upgraded to Fleetsmith Managed — the new name for our existing paid product — with a single click. (If you already know you need advanced management features, you can enroll your devices in Fleetsmith Managed from the get-go, because we want this to be easy for you.)

Once you upgrade devices to Fleetsmith Managed, you can fully automate:

• OS and app installation and patching
• Disk encryption with key escrow
• Security settings enforcement
• WiFi and printer configuration
• And much more!

Fleetsmith Managed costs $8.25 per device per month. However, as with our current product, it is free to try for as long as you need for up to 10 devices.

Upcoming iOS and tvOS support

One more thing…

Fleetsmith’s goal has long been to be the best-of-breed product for ensuring visibility, security and compliance for the entire Apple fleet.

That’s why we’re releasing iOS and tvOS support on August 15th. At launch, iOS and tvOS intelligence and management will be in beta. They’ll also be completely free while the beta period lasts.

As former IT and security professionals, we know that you demand a lot from the products you use to protect and maintain your company’s devices. We want to build products that are worthy of meeting that high bar, and your partnership is crucial. If you have an idea or a concern, we want to hear it!

Nobody knows your needs better than you do, so please drop us a line if you have any questions or feedback.

Originally published at blog.fleetsmith.com on July 31, 2018.