JDisc uses an agile development methodology. Therefore, we release new versions every four to six weeks. This has major advantages for our customers, because they get new features or bugfixes quickly and of course it helps us to get early feedback for new features.

And this release is not an exception. Our new build is a mixture of bugfixes and minor enhancements or new features.

In the past,  we used the standard sorting algorithm that is provided by the Java programming language. However, this algorithm has the disadvantage, that it does not take your current locale into account. Especially the German “Umlaute” have not been sorted properly. This has been fixed in this release and from now on, JDisc is able to sort properly according the user’s locale.

Additionally, we have added support for new devices including Cisco WL2112 wireless access points and some Lenovo laptops.

As mentioned in one of my previous posts, JDisc can populate its custom attributes by executing scripts or binaries. Older versions supported on Windows batch files (.bat) and  Visual Basic Scripts (.vbs). This release adds the capability to execute the more current powershell scripts (.ps1) in order to get the value for a custom attribute.

As many of you know, WMI can create a lot of access problems. In most cases, it is not trivial to find the reason for WMI access problems. JDisc uses since its beginning an optional agent that gets deployed on the target computer in order to collect information. Since 6 months, JDisc can tunnel WMI and registry information through its agent. This release introduces a new option for the tunnel that prefers the tunnel to execute WMI queries. JDisc uses the native WMI protocol only, if the tunnel fails.

We always work closely with our prospects and customers together. One of our prospects pointed us to the fact that Cisco has an index based SNMP community access to retrieve MIB information for its VLANs. In the past, JDisc was able to read only information from the default VLAN. Getting port-forwarding or CDP information from the VLANs was not possible. Together with the prospect, we implemented the index based SNMP community access and we will be able to read the topology information for all configured VLANs.

This release also includes a few minor bugfixes around HyperV virtualization and user discovery.

We are looking forward hearing from you guys out there… So don’t hesitate to post your ideas!