Worcester Polytechnic Institute

RUCKUS® Cloudpath Meets the Challenge at Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Even though the college has a tech-savvy student body, incoming freshmen at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) need help connecting their wireless devices when they arrive on campus at the start of each academic year. To provide it, the school’s IT staff would hold “wireless clinics” attended by up to a thousand students. But those clinics and ongoing help desk support for wireless onboarding took up far too much of the staff’s time and prevented them from working on other, higher-level tasks. Even with IT help, connecting devices was a headache for students. The staff knew a better solution would be to implement a process that would enable students to connect their own devices rather than rely on the IT help desk or network operations staff. So IT decision-makers at WPI began looking for a better wireless onboarding solution for their campus.

Seeking a Cross-Platform Wireless Solution

“We had built our own application for connecting Windows devices, which helped, but it meant we had a single certificate for the entire campus, and no real ‘self-service’ mechanism for any other platform,” says Frank Sweetser, Manager of Network Operations, WPI. “Wireless devices outnumber wired devices three to one, so it was important to find an easy, self-service solution for secure wireless connectivity.”

Sweetser says the most influential factor in WPI’s decision to adopt Cloudpath Enrollment System (ES) solution was conversations he had with peers at other universities who were already using it. “They have environments very similar to ours, so their endorsement meant a lot,” he says. “We did our own research but didn’t find any other solution with a comparable feature set or anywhere close to Cloudpath’s level of maturity.”

Requirements
  • To provide an easy, self-service, secure process to allow Windows, Macintosh, Linus, Android and iOS devices to connect to the internet via certificate-based WPA2- Enterprise Wi-Fi
  • To lighten some of IT’s work load with ease of use
Solutions
  • Cloudpath ES
Benefits
  • Cloudpath ensures wireless security
  • Improvement continues with the ease of use and capabilities of Cloudpath
  • Cloudpath ES has freed up online resources at WPI
To learn more about this project:

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