What needs improvement with Fortinet Wireless?

Documentation could be improved.

Something that can be improved by Fortinet is the organization-wide policy on service contracts. I find that it is a little bit stressful. They have a business model where whatever you buy, you must make a service contract. You can do that for one year or three years or five years. But it seems a little bit like a moneymaking machine rather than a necessity. They require these service contracts and that is not always so well accepted by the clients. To judge the circumstances of the market by bigger business clients who can afford these additional fees may not be the best way to create policy. I work mostly with smaller clients on the threshold of breaking into a bigger business landscape. Mostly those clients are private people and for these people, these business requirements Fortinet has in place are not the best way to build up their successes. I guess I cannot criticize their practices as failing because the company is obviously successful with it. I understand that they also need to make money for evolution, for research and development to stay competitive. But for the private sector, there is a gap. You have these professional suppliers like Aruba and Fortinet and then you have the small suppliers whose products you can buy in the shop around the corner. There is nothing in between. I think Fortinet could be more friendly toward smaller companies and individuals so they could have success with the products while building their businesses and then they are more likely to continue to use the products later. I guess one other improvement they might consider making is with the design of the product. They do not have the most beautiful equipment I have seen in my life. They could hire a designer and the products could be improved substantially in a visual way.

The guest management features need to be improved by adding automation. There is a facility for guest management through a portal, but it should be automatic. As it is now, the IT person has to edit and do things manually. All of the details should be maintained in the FortiCloud. I would like to see some small access points or signal extenders added to the product line to help with areas that do not have full coverage.

This solution should be easier to set up in a production environment.

There are three methods that Fortinet offers wirelessly. The first is industrial, where you have a wireless controller separately and you don't have a FortiGate in the equation. The second is what we call integrated: You get a FortiAP that connects directly to your FortiGate. The third is cloud AP where you just have the AP and you control it through the cloud. On that, they could improve the management side of it. The management side is a bit lacking in its reporting. One of the main features that I see as lacking in any of the Fortinet products is the reporting. If you want to have proper, end-to-end reporting, you must purchase the FortiAnalyzer which is the dedicated reporting and analyzing tool. For a small customer who has only a few APs, you can't justify asking them to run the FortiAnalyzer because that will incur some amount of cost. If Fortinet could offer some better, built-in reporting, that would be a point of improvement.

We're a reference customer for Fortinet, so I get a lot of calls, usually from other schools or colleges, that are looking at deploying the product. When talking to them, they tell me about some of the things that they're looking at. There are some other companies out there that have a feature that's on the access point that allows them to mimic users. For example, if you have an access point in an area, and people are complaining about an issue, the feature that I'm being told is on a competitor's device would allow you to connect to that access point, and actually impersonate a connected device. You're able to troubleshoot any issue that an end-user may be reporting, and hopefully duplicate it. To me, that seems like an amazing feature. I would like to see something like that in the Fortinet solution.

Sometimes we feel that we are buying the top-of-the-line technology and, six months or eight months later, we feel it is already obsolete. New smartphones bring new technology, new ways to connect. Sometimes we have this bad feeling that, even though we are investing tons of money, technology is moving faster than us. So even with this huge amount of investment, one year later we are totally obsolete compared with the new technology. They need to make it move faster. They need to make it easier to configure, easier to monitor, easier to report. We have great tech support from Fortinet, here in Mexico. But if we have a big issue, like a big bug, and they need to produce new versions of the software in their R&D departments, this is the slowest part.

There is very little publicly available information about Virtual Cell and Single Channel Architecture. Promotion of the overall technology is limited as well. Being more vocal about a product that has many advantages would go a long way to eliminating a lot of the confusion and negative perception about Virtual Cell and Single Channel Architecture.

The centralized management features could be improved. I think they're good, but I think they could be better.