Dear Customers,

We’d like to give an update regarding the new Dashboard and how we’re addressing the UI issues we’ve encountered, and also share with you how we are enhancing our processes to ensure we don’t run into performance issues like this in the future.

At the start of the week our focus was on ensuring the performance and reliability of the new Dashboard. We then turned to addressing the highest priority UI issues as reported by you. We’ll be releasing the first set of these updates next Wednesday, so it will be available by Thursday 23rd:

Dashboard v5.50.1 release
– Automatically refresh the client tree and North Pane when making changes in the South Pane
– Ensure the first item in the north pane grids are automatically selected on load
– Allow multi-select of items on the MAV Quarantine tab
– Ensure “Failed” patches are displayed at the top of the patch tab on the south pane
– Ensure dashboard sessions do not time out and data is periodically refreshed to further bolster performance

We’re currently working on the following items and will publish these as soon as we can:
– Ability to drag across a text element in order to highlight it for easy copy and pasting
– Spawn browser tabs rather than new browser windows where possible, for example with Asset Tracking
– Investigating a better way to store Dashboard layout changes so that it does not rely on selecting “Log Off” from the File menu
– Address an issue accessing the Usage Report
– Investigating an issue whereby the Managed Antivirus Scan tab is not updating
– Confirming an issue whereby the grey ‘pending’ icon no longer shows
– Fix a UI issue whereby you can’t reprocess a failed patch when the other patch groups are expanded

There are a couple of UI issues we’d like to make you aware of:
– On the Patch Management tab, in order to reprocess failed patches, please ensure all the patch groups are expanded and not closed
– To save Dashboard layout changes for the next time you login, please select “Log Off” from the File menu

We’re also investigating reports of an issue with Patch Management, we have staff looking at this right now and will reach out to the customers who reported this. We’re also reaching out to customers who have reported time-out issues or slowness since we made updates over the course of the week in order to understand any remaining issues. We’ll continue to review customer support cases through our standard processes and prioritise according to customer impact.

With regards to improving processes and quality control, we’re committed to the following initiatives:
– We’re in the process of implementing an enhanced staging environment to better simulate our production environment
– We’re enhancing our test environment in order to recreate the scale of our production operations
– We’ll continue to improve release communications, starting with sharing release notices 3 days in advance on the RM Dashboard and on the MAX Status blog as standard
– We’re continuing to invest in talent and experience, including these recent appointments: A new Director of Engineering, a new Director of QA, a dedicated Release Build Manager, a dedicated Escalations Manager, along with hires into our QA and DevOps teams as well as engineering
– We will be exploring ways to give customers pre-release access as part of our product design and development cycle so that we capture feedback early and often

We again wish to apologise to the disruption we know this release caused your operations. We are absolutely focused on making these improvements happen so that we deliver the quality of service in our product and in our releases that you expect of us, and this is our commitment.

With Kind Regards,
The MAX Team