With the release of Scense 8 we extend the workspace as we know today to a personalized and customized one with ubiquitous access. Universal access to IT resources, location services, a context-aware user experience, live profiles and dynamic printer management all ensure a high level of freedom and personalization for the user, while leaving control firmly in the hands of the IT department.
Scense 8 has been the result of loyalty to our initial, user-centric vision of IT in combination with feedback from our customers and partners. Next to some major changes to the Scense architectural design, we implemented lots of features to increase the ease of use of our solution. As always, a two day training should be sufficient to use Scense to its full extend and start facilitating your end users the way they expect today.
New feature: Support Windows Communication Foundation – With the support of WCF, the Scense Engines now run within Microsoft’s Internet Information Services. IIS’s scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks. The switch to WCF also results in a change of communication protocols. The DCOM protocol will be replaced by HTTP by default,opening up some new application scenarios. The full Scense service portfolio will be available over the internet, including application distribution.
New Feature: Context Awareness – In Scense 8, ‘scopes’ are introduced. Scopes are collections of ‘criteria’, and these criteria can be used to specify a group of users or computers based on its context. In Scense 8 the scopes are everywhere, used for application-, printer- and other assignments. Scense 8 includes over 20 criteria types that cover all old conditions and new ones like IP subnet checks, Operating System- and Hardware attributes and ‘Computer Location’.
- New Feature: Location Services – Scense 8 includes ‘Location services’ that allow contextual behavior that depends on the computer’s location. Administrators will be able to create a‘Location tree’ which is a hierarchical structure representing the company’s locations like buildings, floors etcetera.This ‘map’ can be used to provision (or block) applications and other resources based on the user’s location.
New feature: Dynamic Printer Management – The Scense Client includes a brand new printer page used by the end-user to browse and search for printers by location or feature. Users can see which printers are available on a specific location and connect to one. At the same time, administrators will be able to define default printers for a certain location.With the new printer page, Scense 8 also introduces the printer object resembling Scense’s application object, including an embedded task set. This printer object completely defines the printer with network share data, feature data and location data. The embedded task set takes care of the runtime aspects of printer connection, disconnection and driver installation.
- Enhanced Feature: Scense Live Profiles – With the shipment on Scense Live Profiles in Scense version 7.6 we already promised further integration of Scense Live Profiles in the Scense client. With Scense 8, end users are able to revert application settings and windows settings to an earlier stage. Also, with Scense 8, application settings will be synchronized between managed, corporate devices and unmanaged devices like an employee owned laptop or home-pc.
- And many more -Next to the features mentioned above, Scense 8 also includes support of Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012 and Windows 8 support.
Known Issues Scense 8
- Scense 8 does not support Oracle databases
Other product improvements and bugfixes
- An issue in the Registry browser was fixed
- ThinApp support has been improved
- An issue with Multiuser deletion incl. Profile was fixed
- A Scense Explorer hang was fixed Several
- Icon cache issues were fixed
- The Nogui parameter issue for the Scense client was fixed
- The Delayed script screensaver dependency issue was fixed
- The Password entered in a Network action is now hidden
- Several FTA issues were fixed
- Several bugs in documentation were fixed