When Fleetsmith arrived on the scene last November, one of the startup’s goals was to help small and midsized businesses (SMBs) finally exert control over their Apple Macs with no drama, using the company’s affordable and user-friendly Mac management product. Fleetsmith fills the gap between free, but complex open-source tools and pricey commercial Mac management software that may intimidate small business owners and IT generalists.
Now, the company is sweetening the deal with a no-cost plan for organizations with a just a handful of Macs.
Today, Fleetsmith introduced its new Free plan, allowing customers with up to 10 Macs to use the cloud-based management solution without spending a dime.
“We believe all companies should have access to secure, easy-to-use computer management software, regardless of their size and resources,” Zack Blum, CEO of Fleetsmith told Small Business Computing. “Until today, access to advanced Mac management hadn’t been available for SMBs. Fleetsmith Free is for SMBs who need to manage and secure their Macs, and for larger companies who need a pain-free way to fully test a solution before rolling it out.”
Surely, there’s a catch?
No tricks here, asserts the company. Fleetsmith Free is full-featured, providing users with access to all of the platform’s capabilities for as long as they want. And those capabilities now include an improved fleet insights experience.
“Fleet insights in Fleetsmith are incredibly powerful because they give admins an instantaneous view into the most critical fleet health factors–Firewall status, disk encryption status, and whether or not a computer has checked in,” Blum said. “Previously, the only option to get these insights was by writing scripts or custom reports, both of which are time and resource intensive.”
Fleetsmith’s device inventory features have been similarly upgraded. Now users can view a device’s host name and computer name, in addition to serial numbers, asset tags and other details. To help new users get up speed, the company has included a new product tutorial that offers guidance on tasks like importing G Suite users and managing applications.
And now, there’s an expanded set of security and DevOps applications that users can manage with Fleetsmith. Newcomers to the platform include osquery, Puppet, Chef, Malwarebytes Breach Remediation and Filebeat.
Those apps “are configurable, meaning they can be configured to fit your company’s deployment type with custom settings,” wrote Blum in blog post today, joined by co-founders Jesse Endahl, Kenneth Kouot and Stevie Hryciw. “You can also deploy them to your fleet in seconds instead of the hours required for manual setup, and we handle all patching automatically.”
The Fleetsmith updates arrive nearly a month after the company announced it had attained EU-U.S. Privacy Shield certification.
“We believe the open exchange of ideas and technology is important for global progress. We also support the individual’s right to privacy, and stand behind the Privacy Shield framework as a means to transfer personal data from the European Economic Area (EEA) to the US,” stated the company in a May 24 announcement.