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New Computers and Servers benefit\purpose?

Talford

As the new 'Computers and Servers' list appears to be going to replace the separate 'Computers' and 'Servers' individual lists can anybody explain the benefit this brings, regardless of any future improvements?

(As an aside, the obvious missing feature in this Beta is the fact there is no search option to find a specific device, which seems like a fundamental requirement and seems an odd feature to be missing even at this early stage, but someone has already raised this in a separate topic so I've upvoted that one).

The article on this beta says 'better handling very large accounts with tens of thousands of devices'.   In such an organisation how does putting endpoints and servers into a single location provide a benefit?   Doesn't this just create an even longer list of devices?    In such an organisation it seems likely that different teams (for example IT Support and Sys Admins) will be managing endpoints and servers respectively, so showing everything at once doesn't add any benefit.    I know there is a filter to split servers and workstations, but why make it harder for people to find what they want?

I can see how this may be useful for a service provider where, for example, they can get a list of all unhealthy devices in one place and send it off to the customer to resolve, but i'm struggling to see what benefit this change is going to bring otherwise.

 

  • +1

    Thanks for the feedback.

    This is a very early stage page still, the development team are actively working on other key capabilities as well. We wated to make customers aware improvements are coming and get us feedback (like this!) to help prioritise the remaining work.

    We do plan to add a generic search like you ask which works across key fields (device name, user name, potentially others).

    Regarding combining the lists of computers and servers, having a single list gives people flexibility to combine if they want to. The filters let people effectively keep a dedicated view if they prefer. 

    Some customers don't like the duplication of having to check for issues twice, once for computers and once for servers. Similarly, the current search is only on the current device type; you can't search across both, and this would let people be able to do that if they want (or still narrow their search to only one device type if desired). We've had passionate feedback that it is annoying to go to the device page, paste in a (server) name, get no results and then have to go to the server tab and repeat the action there!

    This is a very heavily used and mature page, so there are a lot of use cases we're working to accommodate. This is early in the project, it will be a gradual process for some time. We wanted to share that it is underway and provide visibility into capabilities as they're added.

    The project sets us up to address challenges with the current views such as the limited filters and fields. You can't, for example, only see orange health devices (not red, not green) or differentiate a device with red health due to threats from one due to a broken installation (or both problems at once!). You also can't see/filter on endpoint software versions. Being able to add more columns, provide fully flexible filters for those and keep it quick to respond even in larger accounts required a different architecture behind the scenes. There are many other improvements as well, these are just some examples.

    Please keep the feedback coming!

  • 0 in reply to JS

    Thanks JS - i just saw this got verified and that reminded me to come back to it.   I look forward to seeing how this develops.

    One request I have relates to a previous change to the current server and computer views, where the 'Recently Online' filter was added to the filter options.   The previous three filters (OS, Health and Products) always defaulted to show everything but newly added 'Recently Online' filter defaulted to Online recently.   This caused problems for us because we do have systems that can be offline for greater than the required time and our techs were confused why they suddenly vanished.   If the filters could all default to everything in this version then that might help with similar situations.

    With regards to this comment....

    JS said:
    We've had passionate feedback that it is annoying to go to the device page, paste in a (server) name, get no results and then have to go to the server tab and repeat the action there!

    ...I feel the opposite can also be true.   Isn't it just as annoying to see things you didn't ask for (i.e. I want to see workstations only, but Sophos is going to show me the servers as well anyway?).    I know there's going to be a filter, but that's extra clicks required because people have provided feedback because they are making mistakes by clicking X, seeing X and saying they wanted to see actually see Y.

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