Like a blue moon, but not as rare, there will be two Gears releases this March. This first release, which went live on March 3rd is smaller than usual, so it's named after a city instead of a state like our normal releases. Interesting fact about Des Moines, it is the "insurance capital" of the United States, companies such as Principal Financial Group call it home.
Apropos of the above, Gears is an excellent solution for enterprise endpoint compliance in the insurance and finance sectors. Monitoring and managing the security state, especially antivirus and disk encryption, of thousands of computers across multiple offices, states or even continents, with a mix of managed and BYOD devices is our specialty.
Here's what's new with Gears 'Des Moines':
- Separate download pages for managed and guest devices
- Persistent (installed) agent for guest devices
- The other stuff: Bug fixes, performance improvements, known issues
Separate download pages for managed and guest devices
To make deployments easier for our customers, we've split the Add Device download page into two separate pages. There is now one page for accessing the Managed agent installers and another page for accessing the Guest agent installer and portable applications.
The Managed agent download page is not public. It can only be accessed by the account admins. The intention is that this agent is distributed in a controlled manner, typically using Active Directory group policy, system imaging, or application distribution software, and as such should not be on a shareable webpage. This page has a slightly new look and feel.
The Guest agent download page by contrast is shareable. It is still a secured HTTPS page; it is accessible to anyone with the link. The other change you may notice is there are now four options for guest devices — we've added installed (persistent) agent options for guest devices.
Persistent agent for guest devices
If you've ever had a house guest that stayed a bit too long, you know that many people think of the term guest in their own way. Until now, the only option for Gears guest devices was an on-demand (portable) application. We've now created installed agent options for guest devices too. It's ideal for BYOD use cases such as:
- Contractors using their own laptops for extended or on-going engagements
- Employees using personal laptops to augment their managed desktop
- Corporate computers where the user is given local administrator rights, especially software engineers, developers, and support staff or analysts
In these cases, the desktop or laptop in question is usually connected to the corporate network and may even be corporate provided hardware, but it is not considered a managed device. The IT department needs to monitor these devices and enforce network access controls, but they do not perform any remote management or remediation. Gears works exceptionally well in these scenarios, and now is even more flexible.
The other stuff
- A new batch action API was created for the DHCP renewal function
- Clicking the version number in the footer of the Gears cloud console links to the new features blog
- Some documentation cleanup on the developer portal
- Fixed an issue that caused the Gears SDK process to crash sometimes
- Fixed an issue that occasionally caused high CPU usage on Macs
- Patched vulnerability CVE-2015-0254
- Improved detection of some enterprise encryption products
- Performance improvements for Windows agents
Known issues:
- Guest devices with the installed agent are incorrectly labeled as on-demand agents in the device details page
- The 'Delete' button on the guest device details page can cause unexpected behavior for installed guest agents
