The BigFix Inventory Development Team is pleased to announce that a new drop of the BigFix Inventory beta is available!
Thanks to valuable feedback from customers, the following new functionalities are introduced to facilitate your work with BigFix Inventory:
1. Defining the format of the host serial number
There are situations in which showing information about host serial numbers on the BigFix Inventory user interface is not desired. One of such situations is the service provider’s environment. To address the issue, the possibility of choosing a template used to define how information about hosts is displayed on the user interface is introduced. You can now adjust the template according to your needs and ensure that no sensitive data is visible.
2. Improved data visibility and computer groups management
Improvements are also introduced in the area of data visibility and computer groups management. These include:
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Limitation of information that is displayed on the Audit Trail report to actions performed only within the computer group to which the user who views the report has access.
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Introduction of a permission that gives a read-only access to information about contracts.
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Possibility of enabling and disabling subcapacity calculations per computer group and choosing the mode that defines how often subcapacity data is calculated for a particular computer group.
These improvements give more flexibility and better management of data visibility in situations where computers are divided into groups and each group is managed by a different person. For example, in the service provider’s environment or when computers are divided into regions or business units.
3. Ad-hoc reporting of the raw data
In the previous release, the possibility of defining the time range of some reports in relation to the current date was introduced. This functionality is now extended to hardware inventory reports, for example the Computers and the Scanned File Data reports.
4. Enabling and disabling deployment of automatic actions
If you are interested in the installable beta, you can try out a new feature that allows for controlling the deployment of automatic actions performed during the installation or when adding a new data source to the existing License Metric Tool. The actions include:
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Import of the new software catalog to the BigFix server.
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Configuration of scan frequency and schedule on the Scan Configurations panel.
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Automatic configuration of the fixlet site on the BigFix server that is added as a new data source.
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Installation and configuration of the main VM Manager Tool on the BigFix server that is added as a new data source.
Thanks to enabling the automatic deployment of these actions, you can reduce the amount of time and resources needed to configure BigFix Inventory to collect data from the computers in your infrastructure.
5. Configuring advanced server setting on the user interface
Instead of using REST API for changing server settings, you can now easily change the settings on the Advanced Server Settings panel.
We encourage you to join us during the live demo sessions to be up-to-date with the new features that we are currently working. The live demo sessions are also a great opportunity to provide your feedback about the current functionalities or about features that would make your work with BigFix Inventory easier.
If you would like to be invited to the next live demo session, please send us an e-mail to talk2sam@us.ibm.com. For information about enrolling to the beta program, see: https://ibm.biz/beta_program.