Folks:
Thanks for the inquiries. Last year, Dartware ran a customer survey asking about
the most highly desired features that we should add to the product. It was very
useful to see which ones you valued most highly. Our suspicions were confirmed
for most of them, although there were a few surprises. As a result of the
survey:
1) We are committed to bringing out the following new features this year.
- Authentication Server. Gives the ability to authenticate users against a
separate database, e.g., LDAP, Radius, IAS, Active Domain, etc.
- Elimination of redundant polling. A device that appears on multiple
maps will
share the data from a single poll, so that the physical device will only be
queried once.
- Collections of probes. You'll be able to collect several different
probes into
a single icon. That icon will reflect the most serious condition of the
sub-probes.
- The ability to display switches more accurately. InterMapper will be
able to
find which device is attached to which port, automatically connect devices to
the proper port, etc.
- Making InterMapper's data available in an SQL database. We will publish
the
schema so that customers can make their own analysis of the data.
These will ship in separate releases over the year. We just released a prototype
of the Authentication Server to selected testers. We will solicit testers and
feedback for the other features in the next few months. If you would like to
participate, please get back to me off-list.
2) The survey also illuminated the need for a number of other features.
Many of
these were implemented in InterMapper 4.5, including:
- Autosave. InterMapper continually saves the changes you make to the
map, with
an opportunity to save a backup, and restore to that version if you want to
discard changes.
- New probe facilities. InterMapper now gives alarms if packet loss or
round-trip times get too high. In addition, there is a preference to ignore
outages on certain devices that are expected to be turned off from time to time
(such as desktop machines or laptops).
- Logging entries to a syslog server. InterMapper sends its Error Log
files to a
designated syslog server.
- Responsibilities. You can view and set the notifiers for a particular
person
easily. This is a highly-prized capability of the Traditional version is now
available for all platforms.
- In addition, we did a major makeover of the appearance of the graphical
user
interface, enhanced the custom probe language, and added a number of other
useful features.
3) Oh, yes. One more thing: Who won the raffle prizes?
- iPod nano: Rich Battin
- InterMapper T-shirts: William Weisert, Stephen Riccardi, Farrell
Lecorps,
James Ashe, Jim Hurst
We thank you all for your support. Please get back to me with requests,
suggestions, or comments.
Rich Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dartware, LLC http://www.dartware.com
10 Buck Road, PO Box 130 Telephone: 603-643-9600
Hanover, NH 03755-0130 USA Fax: 603-643-2289
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