Paul Beesley

EduSweep is just approaching release but I already have big plans for the next version. Here’s a look at just 3 of the many new features currently in development:

Scan Profiles

Let’s say your users are split over 5 servers and you scan them once a week. You shouldn’t have to babysit the process, adding the scan targets each time, just set up the scan how you like it - choose the definitions to use, the targets to scan and the action to take - and press save. The next time you want to scan those servers, all you need to do is select the profile and away you go!

Integration with TRID

TRID is an impressive project, looked after by Marco Pontello. It identifies a file’s type by matching patterns against a known list. For example, TRID detects MP3 files based upon the hex pattern 49 44 33 in the file header.

For EduSweep, this unlocks a great deal of power. Your students have renamed all their WMVs to TXT files? No problem - the files will be detected and flagged by the TRID library in EduSweep. Truly intelligent file identification will be a great asset to the software and could well pick up on malicious files you never knew you had on your network!

The TRID library is free for personal and educational use but I’ll be contacting Marco about integrating it into EduSweep, just to be on the safe side. If I do use it, I’ll be sure to send a healthy donation his way.

Speed, speed and more speed!

Some of the latest code I’m working on involves multi-threading. EduSweep 1.x is already threaded to keep the UI responsive but the scanner itself is just a single thread. An experimental piece of code that I’ve cooked up tests the scan targets to see if they live on different computers or different physical drives on the same computer. Physically separate targets will each get their own scan thread to really maximise the scan speed for multiple targets and large networks.

But wait, there’s more!

Those are just a handful of the cool features I’m working on. I’ll post an update soon with perhaps a few more nifty additions. Watch this space!