“But didn’t 7.9.0.5 just come out 2 weeks ago??” Yes, yes it did. One thing we didn’t mention in that release was some under the hood performance enhancements. Unfortunately a bug evaded us in testing that can cause intermittent data load failures in the Web UI. We wanted to hurry up and deal with that critter so you can properly experience the enhanced performance. We highly recommend all 7.9 users upgrade to this latest release to take advantage of the various bug fixes and new features since initial release in the fall.
But you know how we are right? Never a moment’s rest! So this is far from just a bug release, there are actually 3 significant new features. It’s worth noting every one of these came from customers, so we remind you that feedback drives the product. Any time you find a bug or have a suggestion/request/feedback just let us know.
New Software Visibility
A few customers actually asked for this one. The Software page in the Web UI is designed to be a catalogue of everything in your environment for “public” viewing. There are always those items you don’t want to show up in these lists for the every day user, and you could always hide those one by one (or in bulk with a Script in KeyConfigure). But some sites want to vet any newly discovered items rather than have them auto publish. A new General Setting allows you to set ALL newly discovered Products to not show in lists. This way your well curated catalogue doesn’t suddenly have unexpected items mid year. Simply review your new software alerts in the admin side and when you note something you want visible you can go make that item show up.
“Geofenced” Device Discovery
The requests we’ve heard for this typically relate to laptops that travel outside the organization. Our Device discovery has been largely well received, especially for gathering a monitor inventory. However when you have someone who goes home and plugs in a personal display, and then travels and plugs in to something at a conference, you start getting a lot of unwanted guests. To help with this we had implemented the Division level option to turn off device audits. The thinking was you would simply have those wandering machines in a Division you didn’t audit devices for. But you still want the peripherals seen at work to collect automatically? Well now you can.
The new General Setting for this allows choice of a single Group that is the target of device audits. This lets you leverage the little used Locations feature of the platform, where you define network ranges. You can define Locations for your subnets, add them to a Group, and limit device auditing to that Group. Then when the laptop is in the office we find the office display, but at home and on the road we don’t pick up the strays getting connected. Just remember to not add your VPN pool of course 😉
More Asset Fields from Client
We have long had the ability to pull certain asset fields from the client by registry or plist value. These were the AssetID, Owner, Location, and Department (along with the 10 custom fields). With this new version we have added Building, Room, Region, and ManagedBy. Now you can use your in house script foo to pull in and populate all these asset fields on endpoints, and we’ll gather them up and populate the Computer records on the server.
As always see our full Release History for other bug fix and feature information.
See you next release!
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