Fleetsmith Erfahrungen

Pricing is very attractive (free) with less than 10 assets, impossible to beat. Profiles are easy to setup and it does help to get started very quickly. Installation is also very straightforward which is GREAT as opposed to some other tools we assessed.
MDM and DEP are supported, which is awesome so that you can literally leave the computer setup itself (although we have not yet activated DEP).
Would recommend to anyone considering to secure a small park of computers to give it a try on a machine to see if it fits their needs.

It supports only Apple devices, pricing may give me second thoughts going over 10 users (we will want to retain the software but some competitor may become more interesting).
It does integrate a lot of features and software that can be installed automatically on computers, however it does not support ALL the software we wish to see. It also does not include (as yet) device location tracking or some "smart" features such as automatically enforcing updates within X days for vulnerable softwares (for example some Chrome updates are "cosmetic" but some do fix security issues and it would be great to see them automatically enforced without manual action). Still... quite sure these will come in time!

We started using Fleetsmith before Apple acquired the company and the ability to easily onboard users with a generous free tier was superb. The ability to deploy a number of key pieces of software from their catalog was great and there we some good levels of control over device settings including key escrow for disk encryption.

Many of the features that made it so great disappeared overnight though and have not returned. There is no roadmap from Apple to say what the plans are. There were also little things that you couldn't acheive with Fleetsmith such as easily deploying a website shortcut to the desktop. Luckily they did leave the custom script in place so bash is an option but this is something that should be slicker.

Fleetsmith has great integration with GSuite and a clear and straightforward management dashboard to deploy and manage assets. The setup is very simple and takes no time to get plugging away at configuring your environment. The support team via tickets or in Slack are super helpful, responsive, and all around a great group of people to help out if needed. Also, the way that FS keeps apps that don't require an update continuously updated while closed is a really elegant way to not worry about an ever growing collection of end user apps.

The biggest issues I have encountered come with the implementation of profiles in FS and the lack of custom package deployment. The approve and assign process could definitely use some streamlining as it's a few steps to get things how I like them. The Global Profile is not useful for me as there are a lot of different subsets of devices. This is further compounded by the inability to assign multiple profiles which I would find very useful in an enterprise settings (tailoring devices by department and/or geographic location).

As for the applications catalog, it's got some standards in there, but it is very limited. Without the ability deploy custom packages and now whitelist KEXT unless it's in the FS catalog, it really defeats a lot of convenience of an MDM

It makes managing fleets of machines with a directory of users from Gsuite and flawlessly handles assignment of machines with Apples DEP product and removes 80-90% of the headache of managing a fleet of macs.

The UI is dreamy and is joyful to use due to the large (and ever-expanding) list of software and configuration options.

The one thing that lacks is support for Apples Volume Purchasing Program. It may be one thing, but it is a big thing.

The app store is central to Mac OS and not being able to make use of VPP is the one part of Fleetsmith that removes joy.

The software is the perfect balance of enterprise ready and user friendly - almost zero setup time, easy to manage and keep running smoothly.

Initially it only worked with G-Suite accounts but the move to support Azure AD/Office 365 solved that.

I really love Fleetsmith's UI and ease of use. No training is required to figure out how Fleetsmith works.

I wish Fleetsmith had kernel extension whitelisting. This would make it possible to silently deploy custom software such as anti-viruses.

The learning curve and ease of implementation. I literally setup in less than 30 minutes!

There are some feature sets that are lacking which can be found in most other competitors.

Deployment and MDM setup is simple.
Available software is bleeding edge and well supported.
Visibility into our laptop fleet is exceptional.
Most of all, this product makes compliance a cinch.

My only gripe is really the lack of written support for many of the software applications, but the support team more than makes up for this.

I think locking and erasing stolen laptops is pretty cool. We recently had a stolen laptop that has not come on yet, waiting to see what happens then.
Checking a laptop's health status, battery and storage space is also really helpful in our situation.

That some of the software applications that we use aren't on Fleetsmith yet though you recently added box drive, could you add more such as Tunnelbear?

That I was able to setup in minutes, not months! The other solution I was looking into required costly onboarding that would requires weeks-months of setup and training. No thank you!

Haven't found anything I dislike yet. Still working on figuring out how to deploy office products but I haven't spent much time on it yet. I'm sure it will make sense once I start working on it.