The highly anticipated Wireless Release 8.0 came out last week, and among the feature updates is a key set of enhancements and new modules for Cisco's CMX solution that come with MSE 8.0.  These updates were designed to build out the breadth of location services available to organizations, as well as improve the user experience for customers working with the CMX solution. These enhancements make five great reasons to upgrade to 8.0 today and test out these new tools and features in your Wi-Fi location deployment:

1. Presence Analytics

This new feature enables the use of a single access point (AP) to determine device presence and dwell time. It provides a simplified way to leverage Wi-Fi technology to Detect, Connect, and Engage your customers. Retail stores, hotels, conference facilities, shopping malls, schools, and even city centers can greatly benefit from Presence Analytics. Unleashing this tool can help customers understand the basic, yet powerful, knowledge of the number of visitors to their space, time spent by the visitors, and frequency of visits. It can even provide a more in-depth look into the movement patterns of their visitors, while within their space, giving an understanding of which areas are most attractive to their client base.

Presence Analytics is very simple to configure by naming the entry, selecting the access point, and setting threshold values. Best of all, the majority of CMX Analytics reports are available automatically. All this allows customers to start using CMX Analytics without having to make any changes to their existing network and get immediate value from it.

2. Enhancements to Guest Access
Those familiar with CMX Connect will know that there are two guest access solutions available to customers with Cisco CMX. The first, CMX Connect, provides organizations with a simple, secure way to provide guest Wi-Fi access. CMX Connect offers the option of custom splash pages using a zone-based captive portal.

In MSE 8.0, we have dramatically simplified how CMX Connect is configured. The administrator only needs to indicate information they'd like collected (such as, name and email), and the zones in which the template will be used.

The other guest access solution is CMX for Facebook Wi-Fi. With this solution, organizations can provide guest access via an optional "check-in" via the user's Facebook credentials that routes the user to the company's Facebook page. Customers are connected to the Wi-Fi, and the social login provides an extra boost for brand exposure.

Configuration for CMX for Facebook Wi-Fi with MSE 8.0 is now a simple 2 step process. You simply connect the MSE to your Facebook business account and then configure the Facebook Wi-Fi parameters. No policy based routing and no proxy required!

3. FastLocate

Another of the key features that comes with  MSE 8.0 is called FastLocate, which delivers better location accuracy via more frequent location updates. FastLocate and the high quality location data it provides gives businesses a chance to derive more data-driven insights on locations within their venue that are of most interest to their customers.

4. CMX SDK

The Mobile Application SDK is one of the deployment models for CMX Engage. The CMX SDK provides an easier development path for location-enabled applications by delivering mobile device location  to apps from the backend. Partners or customers working with the CMX SDK can roll out location-enabled applications more quickly, which allows the business to deploy context-aware, location-specific interactions such as push notifications to the customers' device. The CMX SDK also enables the auto-launch specified apps on devices detected on a zone of a venue's Wi-Fi network.

The CMX Connect SDK consists of:

• An Android SDK and sample app
• An iPhone SDK and sample app
• A Cisco CMX Mobile Application Server RPM for Linux

For more information on the CMX SDK and Mobility Services API, visit DevNet.

5. Improved Install Experience and User Interface (UI)

We've revamped the overall installation process so that it is now menu driven and only requires 6 parameters for configuration. The new UI allows for a quick status view of the MSE CPU and client counts, quick links to apps and Beta features, quick links to service status and a visual indication of their current state.

Visit http://developer.cisco.com to downloading this powerful tool and get to building a CMX app for your business.

This is just scratching the surface of the evolution of our location-based services solution. We will be posting follow up blogs to cover these topics in depth and have posted videos on Youtube to help our customers get started using these tools for their Wi-Fi location deployments.

To learn even more on Cisco's CMX (Connected Mobile Experiences), visit www.cisco.com/go/cmx.