The July 2020 release (v7.13) of the Absolute platform helps IT and Security teams:
Plan for device maintenance, and share automated compliance reports with anyone else in your organization
Pinpoint where and why each critical app is failing, and make modern endpoint protection apps self-healing
Scale risk response, and track, fine-tune, cancel, and confirm success of remedial actions
This release includes additional feature enhancements, performance improvements, and optimizations in several areas of the console, as outlined in the Release Notes.
What's New?
Plan for device maintenance and share automated compliance reports with anyone else in your organization
- Scheduled Reports
Automatically generate and email periodic reports, with always-accurate endpoint intelligence collected by Absolute. Share it with your team to plan for regular device interventions in order to address device issues, or with any other stakeholders in your organization to report on compliance or progress on strategic initiatives.
Pinpoint why critical apps fail, and make modern apps self-healing
- Enhanced Application Health Widget and Automatically Pre-filtered Reports
Once reporting is turned on for any of your critical applications supported through Application Persistence (e.g. encryption, endpoint protection, device management, VPN), tailor the Application Health dashboard widget to your specific needs, by narrowing it down to devices that are relevant to you.
Then, simply click on each specific section of the widget to automatically generate a pre-filtered report to pinpoint exactly which devices have an issue with each of your critical applications and why, so you can fix the problem, identify patterns that suggest a common root cause, and prevent further similar problems.
- Application Persistence
Support for newer versions of VMware Carbon Black Cloud™ and McAfee® ePolicy Orchestrator®: Application Persistence now also supports newer versions of the modern endpoint protection applications, VMware Carbon Black CloudTM (v.3.5.x) and McAfee® ePolicy Orchestrator® (v.5.6.x), so you can ensure your entire fleet is always protected.
Scale remedial actions
- Flag multiple missing devices with a single action
To help you streamline device reclamation and more efficiently respond to missing devices at scale, you can now consolidate reports of missing devices across your organization, and upload a single file to flag multiple missing devices, from just a few to hundreds of thousands, with a single action. You will then get individual device activity alerts to determine the best course of action for each device.
- The new Action History now supports Reach actions and at-scale action cancellations
The recently introduced Action History now also supports Reach (Run Script) actions, in addition to Wipe. This allows you to track progress and confirm the successful execution of any Reach scripts on one or multiple devices, such as forcing Windows updates or implementing temporary solutions to device vulnerabilities, among many other scripts included in the Reach Library (130+ pre-built scripts) or created by yourself.
If a Wipe or Reach action has been requested but not yet performed, but the circumstances have changed and it’s no longer necessary, you can now easily cancel it on any devices of your choice. For example, you may want to cancel a Wipe action on a lost device that was just found or cancel a temporary solution to a critical vulnerability as soon as a patch is available and installed. Additionally, you can now search for and filter specific actions within the Action History report.
Additional Enhacements
This release also includes several feature enhancements in other areas of the Absolute console, including:
- Navigation: The navigation bar has been updated and now includes a direct link to the Dashboard.
- Home Dashboard: Enhanced widget titles, encryption status trend view, and license consumption widget.
- Supervisor Password Management: Enhanced Device Details page for eligible devices, and version control.
- Device Groups: When creating/editing a device group, you can now use a Custom Field to filter the device list.
- Hardware Data Collection: The ‘Camera > Is Enabled’ field is now populated for Mac devices, and available in reports and under ‘Hardware > Camera’ on the Device Details page.
- Reports: If a policy has never been activated on a device, ‘Not Installed’ now shows in the policy's status column instead of ‘No Data’.
- Event History: When applying a filter, the following criteria are now listed first: Date, Device, Event, and User. The remaining filter criteria are listed in alphabetical order after those items.
- Device Freeze (Absolute 7 version): Email notifications now indicate the type of freeze.
- Device Wipe: The device's network connection is now blocked during the Wipe process. You must now select a check box to acknowledge that the action can't be canceled or undone after the Wipe is deployed, and a device is now marked as ineligible for this action if it has an open theft report.
- Reach Library: The navigation bar has been updated and now includes a direct link to the Dashboard.
- Rising Web Usage Report (Education only): The ‘Add Firewall Port Rule’ script has been updated. You can now use the following script variables to customize the script: LocalPort (formerly Port), RemotePort, LocalIP, RemoteIP, EdgeTraversal, InterfaceType, and Security.
- Mac Support: You can now export this report, and when multiple web categories are associated with a webpage, the categories are now sorted alphabetically.
- Persistence Activation: When a BitLocker-encrypted Windows device needs to restart to activate (or deactivate) persistence of the Absolute agent, the user can now postpone the restart for 8 hours.
- Single Sign-On (SSO): Absolute's SSO solution now supports SAML requests and responses hashed with SHA-256 and signed with an RSA-SHA256 signing algorithm.
To learn more about additional improvements and fixes included in the July 2020 release of the Absolute platform (v7.13), please refer to the Release Notes.