Summary

 

Encapto MSP creates a separate Meraki Organisation for each customer and a unbound combined network for each customer site. The combined network is cloned from the template - but not bound. This is to ensure the networks are fully configurable (as bound networks in Meraki are limited in what can be changed).

 

Combined networks are constantly created for consistency, even if the customer only has only a single device type. Note that when importing existing customers (e.g. via sync), they must follow this convention.

 

An APIKey, email and password of the Meraki account is required. Emailand Password are required for web-automation integration where Meraki has not yet made APIs available.

  

How does the Public WiFi feature work?

Encapto MSP integrates with Encapto WiFi to streamline Public WiFi hotspots and allow your customers to configure and self-service their hotspots. Your customers can create their own WiFi portals, enable social logins, surveys and more.

 

Note for Public Wifi to work - you must first enable radius accounting in the Meraki Encapto Template organisation, as well as any existing customer organisations. See Enabling Encapto Wifi in Getting Started for more details.

 

This feature is enabled when assigning an 'Encapto WiFi License' into a customer site via the inventory management (available under the selected customer in the customers' tab). Note that the license points are charged per AP within that site.

 

The 'Encapto WiFi License' inventory item must be purchased alongside the device orders; one license will be required for every site that needs to have a public WiFi hotspot.

 

In additional to the built in social logins, we also support SMS OTP. This allows your customers to configure hot spot portals that capture valid mobile phone numbers by SMSing a on- time-password (OTP) to sign on. This requires an SMS gateway. Please contact support if you would also like this feature enabled on your account https://support.encapto.com/hc/en-us/requests/new.

 

How does the Guest WiFi feature work?

Encapto MSP integrates with Meraki Cloud Authentication to streamline guest WiFi and allow your customers to give WiFi access to specific users (add/edit/delete) via their simplified portal.

 

This feature is enabled when assigning a 'Guest WiFi License' into a customer site via the inventory management (available under the selected customer in the customers' tab). Note that the license points are charged per AP within that site.

 

The 'Guest WiFi License' inventory item must be purchased alongside the device orders; one license will be required for every site that needs to have a guest WiFi.

 

 

CSV Field descriptions

Different CSV templates have different required fields, please ensure you download the template and select either existing or new customers as required. The fields marked required are only required when included in the template.

Field	Required	Description
Company Name	Yes	This is the name of the customer company. For example: "Avalon Airport" or "Joe's Cafe"
Company Reference	Yes	This is used when creating orders for existing customers - e.g. COMXX1234.
Address Line 1	No	This is used for record keeping - the address details for delivery of the hardware
Address Line 2	No	This is used for record keeping - the address details for delivery of the hardware
City	No	This is used for record keeping - the address details for delivery of the hardware
State	No	This is used for record keeping - the address details for delivery of the hardware
ZIP	No	This is used for record keeping - the address details for delivery of the hardware
Country	No	This is used for record keeping - the address details for delivery of the hardware
Timezone	No	The timezone of the customer. If blank, this will default to the timezone of the MSP. E.g. "Australia/Melbourne". See here for a full table of available time zones. This affects some functionality for the customer - e.g. reporting and other scheduled events.
Contact	Yes	The contact name of the customer.
Email	Yes	The email address of the customer. This email will be the customer login identifier, they will receive an activation email to set their password.
Contact Number	No	For record keeping - the contact phone number of the customer.
Site Name	No	When populated, the order will be allocated to a site matching that name in the customers account. If left blank, the inventory will be left unallocated.
INV: [SKU]	No	The number of 'SKU' inventory items to include in the order. See the inventory catalogue to view the details of an inventory SKU item.
ADDON: [SKU] / EDITION: [SKU]	No	The number of 'SKU' plans/addons to include in the order. See the product details to view what the specific SKU includes.
SYNC GUEST WIFI	No	(Y/N) Whether or not to include Guest WiFi licenses for every Meraki MR device found. This allows customers to use Guest WiFi features
SYNC-PUBLIC-WIFI	No	(Y/N) Whether or not to include Public WiFi licenses for every Meraki MR device found. This allows customers to use Public WiFi features.
Meraki Order No	Yes	The Meraki order number to claim for the customer. All devices and licenses in this order will be assigned to the Customers Meraki organisation.
MERAKI-ORG-NAME	Yes	This is used when importing customers that already have a Meraki organisation. It is used to identify which Meraki Organisation to import for the customer. Please see 'Migrating existing customers to Encapto MSP' for more information.
CONNECTWISE-ID	Yes	The company identifier in Connectwise Manage
SYNC-CONNECTWISE-SUPPORT	No	Whether to automatically create Connectwise Support Ticket licenses for each site found for the company. This will enable the support ticket widgets on every enabled site of the customers Encapto MSP portal.

 

Creating/Upgrading Customers (via the inventory catalogue)

You can create or upgrade existing customers with items directly from the inventory catalogue via CSV. Each row in the CSV corresponds to a single site order for a customer. Multi-site orders for a single customer can be created by having multiple rows with the same customer details (company name for new orders, company reference for existing).

Steps

1. Log on to your Encapto MSP account
2. Navigate to the Customers page
3. Click 'import' on the top right hand side
4. Select 'Using inventory catalogue'
5. Download the 'New Customer' CSV template to onboard new customers, or the 'Existing Customer' CSV template to add items to existing customers
6. Fill in the CSV as needed. See the CSV field descriptions above. Once the CSV has been filled in, upload the CSV using the upload button
7. Click 'Finish' to process the CSV.
8. An order will be created for each row in the CSV. Navigate to the Orders page to track their progress.

 

Link existing customers to Encapto MSP

If you have existing customers using Meraki, you can easily link them to Encapto Encapto MSP to give them a convenient self-service portal. Please read this documentation carefully before linking live customers.

 

Process

Note that the Meraki organisation must only be for that customer, and that the Encapto MSP Meraki account (e.g. Robot User) must have access to that organization.

Each customer that is linked will have migration order (viewable in the orders pane in Encapto MSP) which will:

• Check if the customer already has one or more Meraki templates. If there are templates, you will be prompted to select one to be used when creating new sites, otherwise the migration process will automatically create a fresh template.
• Check the customer's Meraki organisation is compatible with Encapto MSP:
  • Only unbound combined networks are used
  • SSID slots 13-15 are free.
  • If there are any issues with the above, you will be prompted to resolve them (see here for more details). Otherwise, no changes are required to the customer's setup.
• From here, the remaining process is automated
• Create a new customer company account in Encapto MSP
• Create a login for the customer, including an activation email for them to activate their account (and set their password) for Encapto MSP
• Create a self-service Encapto MSP portal for the customer, branded to your company
• Scan the Meraki organisation and create the associated inventory items and sites in the customer's Encapto account.

 

Importing customers with incompatible Meraki configurations

The import tool will create a separate order for every customer to be imported. Each order will check the customer Meraki organisation for compatibility issues, if it finds any issues - the order for that specific customer will stop with a status of 'needs attention'. Click on 'Resolve' button to view the issues and options for resolution.

You can choose to let Encapto automatically resolve the issues (please read the details below on what this involves) or do it yourself and recheck the compatibility in the dialog.

If you have any uncertainties, questions or issues - feel free to contact support@encapto.com

 

Bound Networks found

Encapto MSP does not work with networks bound to Meraki templates, as Meraki restricts the changes that can be made to those networks.

This can be resolved automatically, Encapto will split the network (if combined), unbind the network components (keeping their current settings) and then recombine them back.

This does mean that any changes to that Meraki template will no longer propagate to those networks.

This can also be done manually in the Meraki portal if you wish. There is no downtime or configuration loss expected for this process - however we still recommend doing this out of hours.

 

Incompatible Networks Found

Encapto MSP can automatically convert standalone networks to combined networks. This is done by cloning (not binding) the selected template to a new combined network, and splitting the network, and then recombining again with the standalone network. The same network name will be used as the combined network name - however combined networks have a smaller character limit then standalone, so you may also be asked to shorten the name.

Similarly, if existing combined networks are missing required components, Encapto MSP can process them (by creating a fresh combined network from a template to obtain the missing components and combining that).

This can also be done manually in the Meraki portal if you wish. There is no downtime or configuration loss expected for this process - however we still recommend doing this out of hours.

 

Required SSID slots in use

SSID slots 13-15 on the existing customers networks will be used by Encapto MSP. If those SSIDs slots are already in use, please move them to other free slots before migrating - or contact support to change the SSIDs Encapto uses by default.

If you continue the process without moving the SSIDS then the SSID configurations will be overridden.

Slot 13 will be automatically configured at the time of migration to be for Private WiFi (password enabled).

Slot 14 and 15 are automatically configured as Public (slot 14) or Guest (slot 15) at the time licenses are allocated to the customers network.

Other SSID slots will not be changed or used by Encapto MSP.

 

Cancelling the order

If for any reason you do not want to proceed with the order for this customer - you can click cancel. The customer's Meraki organisation will not be touched, and you can always try importing that customer again later.

 

Steps

To migrate existing customers to Encapto MSP, you will first need to:

Give access to the existing organizations to the Robot User account:

1. Login to the Meraki portal using your credentials
2. Select the customer organization you wish to migrate
3. Follow the Meraki documentation on the steps to add a new admin to the organization. The Robot User will need full access.
4. Meraki will send an invitation email to the Robot User email. Before accepting, you will first need to log yourself out of the Meraki portal.

 

 

Once the Robot User has access to those organizations, you can then migrate those customers by:

1. Log on to your Encapto MSP account
2. Navigate to Link
3. Click Import on the right-hand side
4. You can now either select "Import existing customer" if you're importing a couple of customer or "Download CSV Template" for bulk CSV import

 

 

Import existing customer steps

1. Enter the customer company name, and contact details. The email address will be used as the primary account holder email for the customer dashboard.
2. Click Next
3. Find and select the Meraki organisation to import from the list. If not present - then it's likely that the Encapto Robot User does not have access to their organisation - see "Give access to the existing organizations to the Robot User account" above
4. Select the public or guest wifi options if desired. This will enable additional functionality on the customers dashboard - note that both these items come with a small point usage cost in Encapto MSP.
5. Click Next
6. Verify the details and confirm. You can optionally check "import another" to start the process again for importing another customer.
   
   

Bulk CSV Import Steps:

1. Select Download new customer template to download the CSV template
2. Fill in the CSV template with your customer's orders. See the documentation above for CSV field descriptions.
   NOTE: that you will need to provide the Meraki Organisation name for each customer.
3. Select Upload CSV from the Import menu and upload your CSV
4. A migration order will be created for each row of the CSV. If any orders have issues, they will stop and await resolution in the 'Orders' screen. You will also receive an email stating that they are awaiting resolution. See here for more details.

 

Creating Customers (via claim order)

To create customers, you will need to upload a CSV of the customers and Meraki Order numbers. Each row in the CSV will create a separate customer order in Encapto MSP, which will:

To create new customers in Encapto MSP;

1. Log on to your Encapto MSP account
2. Navigate to Products
3. Expand the Claim Meraki Orders product
4. Click Import on the right-hand side
5. Select Download new customer template to download the CSV template
6. Fill in the CSV template with your customer's details
7. Select Upload CSV from the Import menu and upload your CSV
   
   
   
   
8. Please note it'll take few minutes to create a customer; you will see the progress in Orders Queue
   
   
   
   
9. Once the order is moved to Completed, Navigate to Customers to see the newly created customer

 

Upgrading customers (via claim order)

You can add more devices to customers in Encapto MSP - this is the same as creating new customers, but you will need to provide an existing customer reference instead of all of the customer details.

 

Each row in the CSV will create a separate customer order in Encapto MSP, which will:

• Claim the devices and licenses from the Meraki order into the customer's Meraki organisation
• Create the necessary Encapto MSP inventory items for that customer
• Update the customer portal with the new features (if required)

 Below are the allocation matrix based on the site name field in the CSV you upload, 

• No site name > no device allocation
  
  NOTE: When the site name is left blank, the order will stop with a manual reminder step for the MSP admin to acknowledge and proceed to the inventory management screen to complete the allocation.
  
  
• Match existing customer site name / reference in Encapto MSP > allocate devices and licenses to that site
• New site name > create a new site and allocate devices and licenses in Meraki.

 

To upgrade a customer in Encapto MSP;

1. Log on to your Encapto MSP account
2. Navigate to Products
3. Expand the Claim Meraki Orders product
4. Click Import on the right-hand side
5. Select Download existing customer template to download the CSV template
6. Fill in the CSV template with your customer orders
   • You can find your customer reference under the Customers page in Encapto MSP; it is shown after the customer name, e.g. COM000BT9L
     
     

• Select Upload CSV from the Import menu and upload your CSV

 

After-sales add-ons for customers

Product configurations in Encapto MSP typically sell bundles, which is great for when customers are signing up or upgrading.

However, existing customers may need some specific items without needing an entire bundle. The items may have been available in the bundle plan as add-ons when the customer signed up (perhaps at a favorable price) - but in that product configuration they cannot be purchased without also buying the bundle.

The 'Upgrades' product is for existing customers who need to purchase specific additional items without buying bundle. Every item in the 'Upgrades' product is available individually.

 

Note:

• only existing customers can purchase items in 'upgrades'
• If you are using the 'Claim Meraki Orders' product to process orders, then that should be used to purchased additional Meraki devices and products.

 

To upgrade a customer in Encapto MSP;

1. Log on to your Encapto MSP account
2. Navigate to Products
3. Expand the Upgrades product
4. Click Import on the right-hand side
5. Select Download existing customer template to download the CSV template
6. Fill in the CSV template with your customer orders
7. Select Upload CSV from the Import menu and upload your CSV
   1. You can find your customer reference under the Customers page in Encapto MSP; it is shown after the customer name, e.g. COM000BT9L