Chapter 1. What's New in this Release

Table of Contents

Major New Features/Improvements
New and Changed Platform Support

Major New Features/Improvements

The major new features introduced in this release since the version 9 release are:

  • ISO 19770-2 Software Tags. This release introduces support for discovering ISO 19770-2 compliant software tag files. Compliant software will install a software tag file during installation which describes the software. SysInfo will search for and parse these tag files. Results are reported as part of the normal SysInfo Software data class. SysInfo also installs software tags for itself during installation.

  • Enhanced XML. This release provides enhanced XML output encoding. The new encoding is more extensible and parsable. An XSD schema file is provided to allow third-party tools to more easily parse SysInfo's XML output.

  • Java API A new Java API for SysInfo is introduced with this release. The API supports access to all SysInfo data classes from the local system by running the SysInfo CLI or from a remote system via the SysInfo SSP protocol. The Java API is included in the new SysInfo Java SDK distribution. The SDK includes a Programmer's Guide, Reference Guide, and Java source code examples.

  • Software License support on Windows. The License data class is now supported on Windows.

  • Software Serial Numbers on Windows. Most Microsoft and Adobe products with Serial number keys are now reported in the Serial attribute of the Software data class.

  • Enhanced OS Information. The Software data class now includes an entry for the Operating System along with relative attributes. The OS entry has a Category type of "OS" to allow for easy identification. The date the OS was installed is included on supported platforms.

  • Intel CPU information enhanced. Information on Intel CPU's has been greatly enhanced to report many new attributes including: CodeName, Family, SPEC, LaunchDate, Lithography, Media, OrderCode, Socket, SysBus, AppArch, HasGraphics, Stepping, MaxMemory, MemoryTypes, MemoryChannels, MaxMemoryBw, PciExpressRev, PciExpressCfgs, PciExpressPorts, Power.

  • Improved Device Detection on Solaris. The Device detection on Solaris has been revamped to use a cleaner, more simple methodology which has resulted in improved stability and consistancy.

  • Virtual Machine support for Xen. Added support for reporting Xen based VM guests including Red Hat VM guests. Also added support for detecting if we are running inside Xen based VM such as Red Hat VM.

  • New Account Data Class. A new data class has been added to report on a system's user accounts. Attributes include username, UniqueID, TYpe, Status, First/Last/Full Name, Home Directory, and many others.

  • New Job Data Class. A new data class has been added to report on all of a system's scheduled jobs/tasks. Data is discovered from Windows Tasks and cron on UNIX/Linux.

  • IPv6 IP version 6 addressing information is now reported in the NetIf data class.

  • StorSys Pro Feature has been incorporated into the base version of SysInfo™. No additional license is required.

For a complete list of new features and bug fixes in this release, please read the doc/CHANGES.txt file found in the distribution.