Today I’m proud to report that we’ve released ZENworks 2020! It is the next evolution of our Unified Endpoint Management and Protection offering. ZENworks 2020 offers important capabilities that help enhance ZENworks’ ability to manage your ever-expanding endpoint estate in a consistent, enterprise-ready manner; secure your endpoint devices, ensuring that they aren’t the low hanging fruit for attacks; and protect the files that live on those endpoints.

While future blogs will address each of these capabilities in much more detail, I want to take a minute to introduce our key release themes and give you a high-level review of what you can expect. Our release themes for ZENworks 2020 are:

1. Provide a security focused view of your endpoint devices. ZENworks includes several capabilities that help to secure your endpoints. In this release we wanted to strengthen these capabilities and provide new ones in the area of software vulnerability identification, tracking and remediation. In ZENworks 2020 we’ve introduced a new, cohesive getting started page that helps you quickly implement our security capabilities and we’ve introduced new capabilities to identify the CVEs that affect your endpoints, track the impact of those vulnerabilities in your estate, and remediate them by delivering the patches that address them. As we move forward in the ZENworks 2020 lifecycle we’ll deliver additional capabilities in this important area.
2. Provide folder-specific encryption capabilities for your fixed disks. ZENworks 2020 provides updates to the Microsoft Data Encryption Policy in ZENworks Endpoint Security Management that allows you to configure specific folders on your devices to be encrypted using the EFS capabilities built into the Windows platform. It extends these capabilities to provide centralized certificate management and secondary authentication allowing you to centrally manage the data that is encrypted on your devices.
3. Improve bundle status tracking and implement key customer ideas. Every customer that uses ZENworks uses Bundles to deploy software and configuration. ZENworks 2020 offers a new dashboard that lets you more easily see how your bundle deployments are going and provides more timely, accurate and deeper data. ZENworks 2020 also implements several customer ideas that were requested in the ideas portal that should help simplify your day-to-day administration.
4. Implement VERTICA for delivering these capabilities in large enterprises. If you are a large customer, some of these new capabilities such as CVE tracking require a lot of data. As we did our development, we realized that for large customers to benefit we’d need a different way to store the data to ensure that we could provide usable dashboards and great experiences. By using Micro Focus’s VERTICA database solution to augment the existing RDMBS we’ve been able to ensure that even the largest environment should be able to use the CVE identification, tracking and remediation capabilities.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of the functionality we’re introducing in ZENworks 2020. I encourage you to check out the blogs that you’ll see released over the next several weeks for a closer look at each of these themes as well as the smaller individual features. I’d also encourage you to join us for the three community webinars we have that introduce the capabilities, see them in action and ensure a successful migration. You can find the registration links to these webinars here. Finally, if you haven’t already been a part of the beta program, I’d encourage you to download the new installer or appliance from the Customer Center today and take it for a test, then upgrade your production version to begin taking advantage of the new capabilities.