Progress and release date amendment

Since my last post, there have been some significant progress in the Development of EISNet v1.7.

Supervisor is now built within the Manager tool. This means, any user who tries to access Manager, is given access based on their respective rights. Normal users are instantly rejected. Users who belong to the Supervisors security group are allowed access to a cut down version of Manager. They are allowed to review user properties and change passwords. They will also have access to pupils home folders. Supervisors cannot access any computer based resource at this time, although we plan to implement a feature where a teacher can manage their own room of computers depending on where they are logged in.

I've spend the past few days completely re-writing the communication between Manager and Client. Previously, all Manager/Client connectivity was usable but highly limited. This is now more robust and I have introduced two way communication which means Managers sends the commands, Client responds to acknowledge the command, and then updates Manager when the command is complete. This is shown in the Alerts Panel in Manager and allows you to keep track on what your Clients are doing.

We have also implemented 'Remote Login' - a feature missing for such a long time. It is not as streamlined as we hoped as the computers have to reboot once the Auto Login command is sent rather than immediately login, but we cannot find low level API's from Microsoft (we assume this is available to high level Microsoft partners). This has however, opened the possibility of a cyber-cafe style feature for EISNet in a later release.

You can now remotely logoff a user. Previously only Shutdown and Reboot was available.

EISNet Client has now been converted to EISNet v1.7, along with its sister application ' EISNet Agent'. Client  has had the performance and code improvements made to match the other tools. Although Manager in itself will not be changed too much, it is a better tool as a result.

Finally - I do have to announce the slight delay in the EISNet v1.7 release. I had previously stated it would be available in April. However, due to other issues out of my control, it looks like the product will now be released  in the Summer 2012. Although I hope to have all the coding complete by April, we need time to do final in-house and field testing, documentation and training.

I think it's important to get the product right before we release it (unlike some other vendors of course).