[Besadmin-announcements] BES 5.0 Preview

[besadmin-announcements at bigmail.bigfix.com]

Hello,

As you may know, BES 5.0 will be coming out soon. The official release date
is around November 1 and the upgrade Fixlet messages on the BES Support
Fixlet site will be available soon after. We are currently in the beta stage
of the release process and have BES 5.0 currently installed at a few medium
and large deployments.
 
Note that with the introduction of BES 5.0, there are now two product lines:
BES Standard Edition (SE) and an extended version of BES that includes
authoring abilities (see below for more info) that will be sold for an
increased price. BigFix management has decided that everyone who was a
customer before 11/1/04 will receive the additional authoring capabilities
at no additional cost as a 'thank you' to our current customers.
 
Here are some new features that you as a current BES customer may be
specifically be interested in:
- Decreased BES Console memory usage - The BES Console's memory footprint
has been lowered dramatically. Initial indications at our beta sites show
that memory usage will be 20-50% of the memory footprint of the 4.1 version
of the BES Console.
 
- General BES Console performance optimizations - The lower memory footprint
plus a number of optimizations make the BES Console work faster, especially
when multiple users are simultaneously using the BES Console. (Note: there
is now a central control in BES Admin that will allow you to make a global
change to the refresh rates of all the BES Console computers.)
 
- Named actions - You can now name your actions instead of using the default
Fixlet name. So, for example, instead of seeing "MS04-028: Buffer Overrun in
JPEG Parsing (GDI+) Could Allow Code Execution" in the action list, you can
name the action: "MS04-028: Production Server Deployment" or write whatever
you would like.
 
- Action presets - You can now save your action settings so that you can use
them later. For example, if you want to always have an action always show a
specific message box, reapply 3 times upon failure, and apply only to logged
in users,  you can now save those settings and easily select them for later.
 
- Additional Message Box / Restart capabilities (these should be very
popular) - You can now have message boxes time-out (i.e., only stay active
for 10 minutes then automatically apply the action), you can show message
boxes during an action rather than before (i.e., "Windows XP SP2 is
currently being applied. Do NOT restart your computer!"), you can customize
the restart dialog message, you can allow the users to postpone the actions
or restarts, and more...
 
- Improved BES Web Reports - The Web Reports have been improved
significantly. You can now: Filter the overview page to specific criteria,
allow web reports management rights for multiple users (i.e., web report
user "manager" can see the computers managed by 4 BES Console operator
"pete", "bill", and "tina"), see example Web Reports when selecting a custom
report, group by properties when displaying Fixlet reports (i.e., see the
breakdown of Fixlet Compliance by geographic location), see a Fixlet trend
analysis, and more... In addition, the Web Reports are now significantly
faster and put less load on the database.
 
- Many small bug fixes - BES 5.0 fixes a wide range of small issues in the
BES Console, BES Server, BES Relay, and BES Clients to allow for easier use,
faster BES Client reporting, and less problems.
 
- Integrated Fixlet authoring - You can now create Fixlet messages directly
in the BES Console and deploy them to BES Clients.
 
- View an interactive visual representation of your network - You can now
see a visual representation of your network using our "Visualization"
feature.  
 
- Send out tasks to your BES Clients - You can send out "tasks" that are
like Fixlets, but allow for more flexibility in deployment. For instance,
you can use a task to easily deploy a software package to a group of BES
Clients. There are also wizards that allow you to easily create and
customize tasks (such as the "Software Deployment Wizard").
 
- You can now create "analyses", which allow for targeted customizable views
of retrieved properties, so if you want to see the breakdown of running
services on only your workstation computers, you can do that without having
to create web reports or rearrange your retrieved properties list.
 
- And more...
 
 
For more detailed information about the new features along with some
interesting pictures, please read:
<http://support.bigfix.com/bes/changes/bes_5_0_features.pdf>
http://support.bigfix.com/bes/changes/bes_5_0_features.pdf. 
 
A preview version of BES 5.0 will be released soon that you can use in
non-production environments to see the new features before the full release.
 


More information will come soon,
BigFix Product Team

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