Starting with LOGINventory version 9, we will continuously provide new features to offer you more functionality more often and faster. In return, new major versions will contain fewer new features.
Dear customers, partners and friends of LOGINventory,
With this letter we are pleased to inform you about which news we are planning in the upcoming LOGINventory development, why we are doing this, and how you will benefit from them.
Current Situation
During the last years we have continuously developed LOGINventory further, releasing a new major version in a cycle of about 2-3 years, which we made available to you if you had a valid Software Assurance (SWA) or formerly Software Upgrade Subscription LOGINventory (SUSL). During the course of the major release, we have of course tried to fix bugs as best we could and provide small features that were urgently needed by you in a timely manner.
The release of a major version generally already started the development of the following version and you had to wait for bigger feature requests until the release of the next major version.
Also during the development of LOGINventory9 (release expected in the first half of 2021), many developments were already running in the background for quite some time.
We have been developing features for a year and a half and have to wait until the release to make these developments available to you. Here is a short insight to already developed features and their time of completion:
- Newly read values:
- Hyper-V and VMware snapshot / checkpoint information (Q1/2020)
- Information on virtual hard disks of VMs (Q2/2020)
- Actual logins of users to devices (Q4/2020)
- New interface for manual creation of assets: Asset Editor (Q2/2020)
- New Info Widget (Q3/2020):
- Graphical info
- Multiline description texts
- Replaces Journal, ComputerAccount and UserAccount widget
- Display of current Ping Status (Q4/2020)
- New Reports: (Q4/2019)
- Switch Documentation
- Handover Certificate
- QR Codes Compact
- Password Management: user accounts / passwords can be assigned to assets and encrypted using master password (Q1/2020)
- New Query Editor (Q4/2019)
Changes
In the future, we aim to provide you with new features at shorter intervals, which is why we are planning the following changes to our update/upgrade policy with the release of version 9:
We will already provide new, larger features with updates within version 9 as soon as they have been fully developed and tested. This will allow you to benefit from real new features faster and more often, rather than receiving only bug fixes within version 9.
We will continue to release new major versions at intervals of approximately 1.5 – 2.5 years, which will contain the respective features that were released in the lifecycle of the previous version. We will continue this procedure so that active maintenance contracts retain their value. Conversely, this means that the differences between the last update of a previous version and a new major version will be significantly smaller than before, as shown here in the graphic:
Overall, we are confident that you will benefit from these changes and that the waiting time for new features will be significantly reduced.
For example, you can look forward to the following features soon after the release of version 9.0:
- Storage of own relations between assets, users and groups
- License management usability improvements and license model enhancements
- Read ACL permissions from Linux / NAS
- Rule-based categorization of software packages
We are looking forward to a continued good cooperation!
Best regards from the entire LOGINventory team