Whether you're running a fleet of four or 400 beacons, you'll want to have complete control of them at all times. Even if they were deployed on another continent, our stack gives you the full flexibility to make rapid changes, track battery status and oversee the performance of the whole fleet from anywhere in the world.
Tags are the foundation of Proximity SDK and they enable all kinds of interactions (pushing notifications, logging visits, verifying users etc). Attachments, on the other hand, allow for adding additional content to beacons which is used when beacons are detected nearby. If you’re not familiar with both concepts, we cover them in more detail here.
Tags and attachments are set up in Estimote Cloud, without the need to connect to the beacons. This also allows you to change them remotely at any time, as long as you have an internet connection.
The Cloud gives you full control over the user experience, without ever leaving your desk. If you want to fetch different content when a certain beacon is detected, change the attachment in the Cloud. To set up a new zone with a specific tag or to add/remove beacons from an existing zone, make the necessary adjustments in the Cloud. Finally, if you need to replace a beacon at your venue, simply tag a new one with the predecessor’s tag instead of reconfiguring the entire app with the new beacon’s identifier. It's just that simple.
Another aspect you'll want to keep track of is battery life and, well, the physical presence of beacons at your location. Estimote Cloud can notify you when the batteries need to be replaced, or when the beacons fall or even get stolen (yup, that happens too ;-( ). No more sending people to audit the fleet or wondering why no events are being triggered at certain locations. Now, software does it all for you with a feature called Beacon Health Check. It uses the Estimote Telemetry packet to provide all kinds of insights about the beacons' well-being. It is enabled by default but when in doubt, double-check!
Finally, in order to apply multiple pending settings at once instead of connecting to each beacon individually, you can use the iOS Deployment App. It is really useful if you need to update the firmware or enable additional packets on dozens of beacons. As we mentioned above, tags and attachments, along with health data, are updated instantly without the need to connect.
One last option would be to use the management features from the legacy iOS and Android SDKs (we don't recommend them for proximity, though, as those features are now deprecated). There's a very good chance, though, that the solutions from the previous paragraphs will be perfectly sufficient for your use case. If there is, however, any feature missing that would make your life easier, definitely let us know!
From our experience, the approach that typically works for all deployments goes as follows:
- Set tags and attachments in the Cloud and build the right interactions directly in the code of your app.
- Enable Beacon Health Check and deploy beacons, or ship them to your clients.
- Then, you simply make any necessary adjustments on your laptop or use the deployment app if needed. Health Check takes care of your beacons in the meantime while you focus on new endeavors.
Whatever approach you decide to use, your fleet of beacons is in good hands.