New Training: Deploy the Meraki Captive Portal API

In this 7-video skill, CBT Nuggets trainer Knox Hutchinson teaches you how to build and deploy your own website and integrate with the Captive Portal API. Watch this new Cisco training.

Watch the full course: Cisco CCNP Automating Cisco Enterprise Solutions

This training includes:

• 7 videos

• 23 minutes of training

You’ll learn these topics in this skill:

• Building Your Own Splash Page

• The Captive Portal API Architecture

• Enable the Splash Page

• Clone and Understand Your Website

• Deploy Your Website to Azure App Services

• Configure and Test the Captive Portal

• Summarizing the Captive Portal API

Branding Your Guest WiFi Network with the Captive Portal API

Guest WiFi networks are a common deployment in an enterprise network. Businesses want to allow guests, like sales vendors, to be able to connect to their network for internet access safely and securely. At the same time, businesses don't want to incur extra support costs by doing things like creating temporary user accounts for network access or distributing WiFi passwords that may never be updated. Thankfully, organizations can use captive WiFi portals to enable WiFi access for guests without extra layers of complexity. Though it may be an afterthought, it's important to brand your captive portal page.

By branding your captive portal page you are telling guests that this network can be trusted. That branding is a visual queue that tells guests that this network belongs to you. That's not the only benefit, though. By customizing your captive portal, you can add special instructions for network connectivity and terms of use for connecting to that network. You can also collect extra user information if your business requires that as well.

Tools like the Captive Portal API allow IT admins to create specialized portals based on different needs. For example, if your organization has a large campus, one portal can be created to connect guests to a 'cafeteria network' while a specialized portal can be created for guests visiting your engineering team. Each portal can be branded to include specific information like what's on the menu for that day or which manager they should contact for questions in the engineering department. These portals can serve different purposes but are controlled under the same umbrella of operations.