Different vendor products offer different extra gravy. But in general, I see CBW as providing only a few benefits. They are important benefits for large scale implementations, but may not be worth the additional cost for small to medium scale deployments. I see the main advantages as:
1) True mobility - If you wireless LAN is small enough to have all users on a single subnet, you have that anyway. 2) The ability to pop different groups of users onto different vlans without plumbing all those vlans to every access point. Maybe not that valuable for two VLANs and 25 APs. 3) Potential for location-based services. Not clear to me that this is really strategic rather than just "cool." I'm not sure I agree these are "must have" for smaller deployments. We did just fine with per-AP management until we were approaching 100 or so. For the most part, we didn't have to log into them all that often. However, realizing we were going to have 100s and eventually 1000s of APs we bought Airwave's AMP product, which provides an excellent central management platform for stand-alone APs (if you buy brands they support, which is most, maybe all, of the major brands). I don't see the centralized management aspect of CBW to be the driving force for us. Tom Zeller Indiana University [EMAIL PROTECTED] ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
