Skip to main content

Dashworks Release Notes 5.6.0

There are 2 big new features in Dashworks 5.6.0: Ring Scoping Preview and Stock Inventory. Both of these are the culmination of many months of work, and significantly enhance the business value that Dashworks brings. Ring scoping can help with many different types of project, but has particular benefit when planning the rollout of updates to Windows 10. This upfront modelling capability means that you can embark on your project with complete control of the risks. Stock inventory enables you to manage devices in stock or on order just like any other device in your hardware inventory. Hardware lifecycle projects can leverage this new functionality to track devices from birth to death.

Highlights​

Ring Scoping Preview​

screenshot

Ring scoping is a really exciting new feature that enables you to map out your entire project based on risk (DAS-20247). Dashworks can automatically organise any rollout into broad deployment waves (rings) so that your project hits its targets in the most efficient way possible. Applications are grouped by Criticality, and then targets are set for each ring to ensure that enough applications have been tested, to give you confidence to move to the next phase of your project. You can change the parameters, and then remodel your project over and over again until you are completely happy with the results. The preview covers target applications for devices.

Stock Inventory Preview​

screenshot

In a hardware lifecycle project, a procurement manager will typically be given “birthing data“ by the hardware vendor about devices that are on order. This will include manufacturer, model, purchase date, order number, order status and possibly asset tags or serial numbers. This data is important to the success of any hardware lifecycle project, and must be combined with information about existing devices to get a complete picture. The new Stock Inventory Data Import (DAS-21769) enables you to import this data so you can manage new devices before they are connected to network, allowing you to plan hardware refreshes and break-fix incidents.

Custom Fields​

screenshot

Custom fields have now come to Evergreen. Custom fields can be used to store any data about your devices, users, mailboxes and applications that does not have a natural home elsewhere in Dashworks. In this first release you can view, delete and reorder existing custom fields (DAS-25395, DAS-25651, DAS-25652, DAS-25552). The ability to create and edit custom fields via Evergreen and use specific datatypes, such as date is coming soon.

What's New​

  • Details > Tasks: Update Date and Slot

  • Self Service: Mandatory date and select task components

  • Self Service: Earliest and latest selectable date for tasks as an absolute date

  • Self Service: Earliest and latest selectable date for tasks as a date relative to now

  • Support for domain\username format when logging in with windows authentication

  • Dashworks version included in project XML export

  • Background processes to pre-aggregate readinesses now performed in batches to reduce contention

What's Changed​

  • Admin > Projects: Active column has been removed

  • Read Committed Snapshot Isolation set to On for the Temp database to reduce contention

  • Performance improvements to the writing of audit records

What's Been Fixed​

  • Admin > Data Imports: Enabled changed from False to True when unarchiving department data import

  • Admin > Automations: Unsaved changes pop-up is shown in some circumstances, even if changes have not been made

  • Archived devices being picked up for offboarding even if still in scope

Known Issues​

  • Ring Scoping Preview that has been tested on projects with up to 60,000 devices, 2,000 applications and 2,000,000 device-application relationships, projects over this size may have performance issues

  • Details: Duplicated scroll bar in Change Bucket, Capacity Unit and Ring when there is a large number of linked objects

  • Details > Tasks: Capacity colours are not shown on date picker when language is French or German

  • Dashboards: If user session times out when creating a dashboard widget, automation action or Self Service component user receives a pop up warning that they have unsaved changes

  • Admin > Automations: Automation outcome is "TASK CONFIGURATION HAS CHANGED" if the automation has an action which updates a task with capacity

  • Self Service: Owner might not to be onboarded if there is already many objects in the onboarding queue

  • Hardware Inventory: Stock items which have merged with devices in SMS/SCCM 2007 data imports will still be shown as stock items in All Devices in addition to the device

  • Details > Tasks: When editing a date task with no slots in a project that has capacity enabled a date cannot be chosen

  • Self Service: When editing a date task with no slots in a project that has capacity enabled a date cannot be chosen

Notices​

This release ends support for Dashworks installed on the following:

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2

  • Microsoft IIS 8.0

  • Microsoft IIS 8.5

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2014

Dashworks 5.6.1 released in early April 2021 will end support for all versions of Microsoft Explorer.

Dashworks 5.6.2 released in early May 2021 will end support for Microsoft SQL Server 2016 RTM & SP1.

Dashworks 5.6.9 released in early December 2021 will end support for Microsoft SQL Server 2016.

All end of support notices are publicly available here: