As I continue to become familure with the BigFix console interface one thing I would find really useful is a way to sort/group fixlets (particularlly Microsoft fixlets) by applicable OS on the Fixlet Messages tab. Why this would be useful is that we typically patch our workstations, before we get a maintenance window to patch our servers and I think it would be great to have to way to show say… the critical MS patches that are applicable to Windows XP/Vista/7. As it is now I have to scroll through hundreds of patches and sort through wich ones are applicable to workstations and which ones are applicable to servers. Would it be possible to add another “property/folder” in the Microsoft Fixlet window for OS? For example, you expand All Relevant Fixlet Messages --> By Source --> Microsoft --> By Source Severty --> Critical --> By OS?
This would very quickly allow me to sort through the MS patches and see which ones are applicable to my workstation OS’s or my server OS’s.
Funny you should mention this… We have spent the last few weeks trying to reorganize the tree interface for our next version (which has a major UI overhaul). On this particular subject of Fixlets by OS, we talked about it a lot, but finally concluded that it wasn’t very useful because many Fixlets aren’t tied to an OS and there isn’t an easy or consistent way to categorize them.
But what we did do is enable a “quick search filter” that will let you type in things like “WinXP” and it will quickly filter the list to any Fixlet title with WinXP in the title…
The UI refresh is a big part of 8.0 and hopefuly soon we will have some previews available for you guys…
One more thought… will the “quick search filter” allow compound searches? Such as WinXP AND WinVista? What would be good is if you could “save” the search as a user specificed/created group/sort under pre-defined fixlet group.
E.g. Microsoft --> By Source Severity --> Critical --> user created search/sort folder
The quicksearch won’t support ANDs/ORs as far as I know (it will work like the iTunes search), but I do believe that you can save search results/filters…
I guess my thought was that it would be nice to be able to save the search (say fixlets containing XP) as a folder under the Critical (or any other pre-existing group) Microsoft Fixlet group rather than a completely seperate search group.