CIOs, CTOs, and all flavors of decision makers dread hardware updates. And for good reason. Imagine you set up a new Wi-Fi infrastructure in your office. A few weeks later, a Wi-Fi standard changes. It requires new hardware and you need to replace the whole infrastructure. That’s a disaster.
It’s not the case with Estimote Beacons. In the recent months we’ve launched Location Beacons (the robust ones) and refreshed Proximity Beacons (the get-started-quickly ones). And now we’re following up with Estimote Deployment app that makes upgrading your beacon infrastructure as easy as putting the new beacons on walls and tapping a single button. If only Wi-Fi routers worked like that…
Updgrade your beacons faster than you can say ‘beacon infrastructure’
The beacon ecosystem is still at the stage where the only constant is change. Only in the past 12 months we have seen next generation of fast, more capable BLE chips, Google has made a major push into proximity, and Bluetooth SIG annouced Bluetooth 5.0 that will also require new hardware. And we at Estimote have released beacons with new firmware architecture.
But what does it mean for our users? You don’t want to deploy and configure your beacons from scratch. You don’t want to have to modify the app. But even more so, you don’t want to be left behind, when beacons evolve.
No worries. You can easily update to next generation beacons for more reliability, superior battery life, and improved fleet management. Just stick the new beacon next to the old one. All you need is the Estimote Deployment app to automatically migrate all the settings and IDs. Thanks to our patent-pending seamless migration technology there’s no need for any changes to your app, no manual configuration, and what is most important - nothing your users will notice! It just works and takes no more than 30 seconds per beacon. In most cases, you can upgrade your whole beacon infrastructure in one location within 25 minutes.
When you migrate your infrastructure with Estimote Deployment app, we’ll automatically reset the removed beacons to factory settings so you can use them for another project. We’ll also check the batteries and notify you if your beacons are running out of juice. Dispose of them responsibly! If you don’t know how, shoot us an email at recycle@estimote.com and we will take it on from there.
This is an early release of Estimote Deployment, but we’ll keep expanding it over time. Don’t hesitate to let us know how you like it and what other features would help you with installing beacons in your venues. You can reach us on Twitter and via email.
The Deployment app is available in the App Store.You can order Location Beacons on our website.
Marcin Mycek, Product Manager at Estimote
Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote