So as everyone knows, every new flavor of Windows always shows up as WinUnknown X.xxxx until a new BES Client is released.
Is it possible to get BigFix to alter the BES Client to report the “future” Windows names, moving forward? My thought would be for the BES Client to reference an XML (or flat file) if the version of Windows comes up as unknown. Another option would be to reference an external DLL (to figure out the OS) that resides in the BES Support site, which of course, could be updated more frequently. This file could be updated more frequently, and before an “official” new BES Client version is released.
I would love to see the OS property return something like: “Win10 RC” (release candidate) or “Win10 PR” (prerelease). This would be vastly better than “WinUnknown” we currently get, or worse, the Win 6.2.10xxx version we currently see on Windows 10.
I’ve been waiting to see what the next OS comes back as so we can see what we can do based off what Microsoft does. I’m also going to try and determine through our technical contacts earlier if we know what they are doing.
My hope is now that the internal and external versions match, we will be able to always get the right designator. This would make the next one Win10.1 etc.
Adding the pre-release designators is also a good idea as there is I believe a function internally to determine this is a pre-release.
Additionally if you are seeing the wrong Windows identifier on Windows 10, you should be running the latest agents. We have supported Win10 with 9.2.5 or later so please run a new agent.
I address this issue by doing the following in relevance:
windows of operating system
AND (for Windows XP or later)
version of operating system >= "5.1"
This approach uses the version numbering instead of hard coding the OS names, so it assumes forward compatibility, which is usually the correct choice. If needed I can go back and add a constraint for software that installs on Windows up to version 8.1