Beyond the present – a peek at what’s coming soon
“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”
- William Gibson
AUP Informant 2
You can find some teaser screenshots of this much awaited update over at EduGeek. Looking back, I realise that it’s been well over 6 months since the last release but I think you’ll agree that the results are worth the wait. During that time I’ve gone back to the drawing board to address the problems with the old version – difficult configuration and deployment, lack of customisation and poor reporting. These are now things of the past thanks to a complete rewrite.
You’ll find deployment is a snap with ready-made MSI packages and a tiny server application. The client can be customised and rebranded without redeployment and the policy display has been made more flexible and reliable. Reporting gets a boost too with a query-able database, built-in reports and charting capability. There’s also a full PDF manual this time around!
I’m flattered to have had so many requests for beta testing! There are no beta testing positions open right now but feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll contact you if and when one becomes available.
As for a release date, currently I’ll just say “when it’s ready”. I’m targeting July for the gold release but reliability is key so I may change the schedule depending on how beta testing proceeds.
EduSweep 3
The finishing touches are being made to EduSweep 2.1.1, the latest bug fix release. I’m also working in parallel on the next major version and the way in which it’s being developed is quite different from the current release. This time around I’m working on the most popular features from the survey I conducted a while back and the results spell things out pretty clearly:
- Faster scanning – 50% suggested this
- Better detection of flash games – 50% suggested this
- Better reporting – 33% suggested this
Other popular suggestions included scanning within archives and scheduled scans.
So these are naturally my priorities and the results are looking good – an early version of the 3.0 engine is already between 10% and 40% faster than the current one and there’s more performance to squeeze out of it yet. Flash game detection is being stepped up a notch by using the same sort of heuristics that are included in modern antivirus software while reporting is greatly improved with a more powerful interface, statistics and charting.
Project Archer
Early days for this at the moment and I’ll be blogging on what this is about early next month. Watch this space!




