As a follow-up to my previous article about 1E's efficiency platform, ActiveEfficiency (Enable Efficiency, Leverage ActiveEfficiency!), I am here to talk about our latest update to ActiveEfficiency, the newly released ActiveEfficiency 1.7 !
I intend to explore how ActiveEfficiency Server 1.7 has made significant strides in improving usability, performance, and configurability, thereby delivering better value to the suite of 1E products, such as AppClarity, our Software Asset Management solution, and Shopping, the Enterprise App Store.
Let me take you through all the interesting stuff we've been working on for ActiveEfficiency Server 1.7:
'Migration' Mode’ for System Center Configuration Manager:
You know that feeling when you are moving house, when everything feels like no-man's land? What would happen if you embarked on a complex mission to migrate your Systems Management Infrastructure from ConfigManager 2007 to 2012?
- How would you make sure your devices or installations which are in the process of migration are represented consistently?
- How would you make sure you don't lose any historically collected metrics or information?
- How would you make sure you don't double-count inventory items, but at the same time make sure inventory is counted at least once?
Hurrah! ActiveEfficiency Server 1.7 now supports running Configuration Manager discovery in Migration mode. This is best suited for organizations running AppClarity wanting to have an up-to date view of their application ecosystem, during migration. A useful aspect of the Migration mode is that it intelligently harvests inventory and usage data from the appropriate SCCM implementation be that 2007 or 2012. It also ensures you do not lose any historically collected information as you migrate forwards into CM2012, thereby making sure your view is not stale and kept up-to-date!
Lightweight Synchronization for 'Shopping' :
1E's Configuration Manager Discovery mechanism now supports a lightweight mode to gather inventory required by Shopping. This means two things –
- Synchronizing Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager with 'Shopping' is quicker than ever before! We are talking about a 20% improvement in synchronization times!
- More importantly, the lightweight method means Shopping will only download information from ActiveEfficiency that is relevant to Shopping as opposed to a comprehensive data stream, thereby saving precious business bandwidth.
ActiveEfficiency Synchronization Manager – Better scheduling!
With 1.7, you needn't use Windows Task Manager to schedule periodically running tasks. The ActiveEfficiency Sync Manager' is here! Its intuitive interface allows you to setup synchronization schedules for AppClarity and Shopping, replete with configuration options like test mode, which allows one to validate a configured schedule, and user configuration if tasks need to run under the context of non-standard users. Additionally, if you use both AppClarity and Shopping, you can now streamline and chain synchronisation schedules with SCCM, so it is least disruptive to your business, and easily manageable.
AppV 5.0 Support :
ActiveEfficiency Server 1.7 now supports interrogating Microsoft AppV 5.0, which means we can natively harvest Application Virtualization information from Microsoft AppV 5.0. If you have a previously installed version of AppClarity (4.0 onwards), you'll get the goodness by just upgrading to ActiveEfficiency Server 1.7!
Performance improvement around our core HTTP behavior:
ActiveEfficiency relies on HTTP to service requests from server to client, and we've made significant performance improvements to our internal HTTP behavior, leading to a multi-fold increase in client request performance. My colleague talks about it here.
I hope you have as much fun using the latest version of ActiveEfficiency as we've had building it! If you have any questions on ActiveEfficiency, or anything else in particular you'd want to hear about, please get in touch with us at info@1e.com.
