Welcome to our customer support newsletter! This month's newsletter showcases the changes to our products in 2022, in addition to letting you know about some upcoming changes. If it is not rendering correctly or you missed an earlier newsletter, all previous newsletters are located here.
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Changes at Support
With the new year, there will be a few changes in the Support team. Arthur Abramov is moving to a new role as Customer Success Manager. Arthur’s focus will shift from solving issues with software to ensuring you are getting the most value out of it. Your successful usage of your investment is very important to us. Emanuel Cohen will be the new Support Manager. Emanuel has been with us for many years and brings a wide base of product knowledge with him. Oleg Ustoyev will be support lead, assisting the entire support team as needed.
The year in review from a product perspective
2022 has been a very busy year for the R&D team. Some of the highlights from the year include the items below. If you missed reading about them, please review past newsletters and the product release notes. Speaking of release notes, that was one of the significant changes we made. Instead of including the release notes with the product, we now maintain them online:
Our new customers and many of our existing ones have shifted from installing product manually to using the Deployment Packs. These prebuilt Linux images include all of our software and prerequisites all in a single bundle. They also be used to install a simple single-server system for testing or a multiple-server implementation for production usage.
Our Administration and Secure Self-Service tool expanded its coverage of middleware platforms. We now support Kafka (including Confluent specific components)and Solace PubSub+, in addition to IBM MQ, TIBCO EMS, and IBM IIB and ACE. We are already working on additional platforms for release in 2023.
The Web Security Manager was modernized to make it more consistent with the rest of the products and easier to use. It is much faster than the original and has many additional features, such as the ability to customize what a given person can see and do. User authentication was moved to the same security model as the rest of the products since most customers preferred this method.
The Navigator interface had many usage improvements, including scrolling improvements, multiple column sorting, more color options, and many more.
The Navigator attribute filtering underwent a major change when we moved more of the filtering closer to the source of data. This means that by using these filters, you will typically return all of the data required. When working with larger environments, this improves not only the results, but also the responsiveness of the requests.
Knowing the value that your users are getting from our products is important to you. We added statistical views to show the overall usage of the interface.
The REST API has become one of the most important components of our products. Many customers are automating both the deployment and monitoring of their environments. The REST interface plays a key role in many of our customer deployments.
A Java-based connection manager and agent for IBM MQ is available that provides many benefits over its predecessor. Among these are greater scalability and support for remote command execution with SSH.
We provided AutoPilot policy and sensor views, removing the dependency on Internet Explorer and applets. At the same time, this provided a more functional interface, allowing viewing across an enterprise as well as integrating with historical events and fact views.
The ability to annotate analytic or tracking views is a very powerful feature that can be applied to a variety of use cases. For example, it can be used to highlight on a map or image where a given problem is occurring or to identify where in a business flow a bottleneck is occurring.
Integration with Slack was introduced, for collaboration on issues discovered or for sharing findings.
As part of our benchmark reporting, we produced a comparison of major messaging tools. The report compares various types of application patterns. The report is available at https://www.meshiq.com/engage/performance-benchmarking-april-2022/.
Active users on support
Are you registered and using the support system? We are reviewing usage and find that some users have not logged in for some time. We are cleaning out old accounts and encourage you to log in at least every 6 months to keep your account active, even if you are only interested in receiving support emails. If you have forgotten your password, you will need your user name and the email address you registered with. https://support.meshiq.com/lost_pwd_page.php. If you forgot your user name, send an email to support@meshiq.com.