Happy New Year! We hope your holidays were safe and as enjoyable as possible in these unusual times. It’s been a little while, so let’s catch up and kick off 2021 with our first update of the year. As usual we have some new goodies (and the normal bug fix attention) with this release.
Linux Enhancements
We have often heard appreciation from customers about our support for Linux. To be fair however, it never got quite as much attention as Windows or Mac. With this release we look to close that gap. To start with, we detect more distribution names and version numbers. We also can better detect when linux is running in a virtual environment. Looking at the Computers window will now be much more informative.
The new linux client also has additions to detect package versions from typical installer methods like apt (dpkg), yum (rpm) and snap. A few special case items have also been added for major titles like Matlab, Mathematica, and STATA. This means for the first time when you Show Installs on a linux computer, you will see version information! There are a few caveats to this. Not all binaries are well versioned, so some times there can be no variant, or it will be inconsistent with expectation. We are limited by the package distribution. Software with stand alone installers won’t have a version as there is no receipt to read. Some distributions in their Software center use Flatpak which unfortunately lacks reliably accessible version information. That said, our default settings now scan more standard directories for binaries, and the majority of standard RPM and DPKG software should have versions. Even if we can’t read a version, we should have many more programs auto detected without the need for custom configuration. All this means greatly enhanced software inventory for Linux!
We are also working to add Product definitions for popular package to PRS to compliment this upgrade. As always, if you have items you’d like to see just let us know.
Email Reports. Really.
A popular request for some time has been emailing reports. But really email them, not just the email notice with a link to the Web report. We’re happy to say that option is now here. When you configure a scheduled report there are multiple sliders for the various file formats. Simply turn on one or more you’d like to include as attachments in the email. Now you can fire off reports to people and they never have to visit the Web UI at all. This simplifies the experience for those who just need some data and don’t need to understand what this Sassafras web thingy is all about.
Note that graphical reports like Histograms still are not available in PDF format unfortunately due to technical limitations.
Other
- Windows 10 v2009 (aka 20H2) is now recognized fully and displayed properly in the Web UI lists. Similar enhancement for MacOS 11.
- ADFS (Active Directory Federated Services) is now supported for authentication. If you use this, there is a new module to support it.
- Dark Mode on MacOS is now supported in KeyConfigure (i.e. everything should be readable).
- Fresh OS icons in KeyConfigure – Computers for all platforms.
- Custom columns will now save out into XML format for the Computer Hardware Report.
- The Default Map setting in the Web UI now also affect the primary Map Set. It really is the default now.
- Bentley OpenRoadDesigner has been added to the programs that automatically detect plugins (requires client update).
- Overall improvement in some instances when using Bentley apps.
As always check out the Component History for full details and bug fixes.
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