X-Formation - Year in Review - 2022

X-Formation – Year in Review – 2022

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” — Henry Ford

At this time of year, our thoughts often turn to what we’ve accomplished, and what is to come.

As we look at our past year here at X-Formation, we’re proud of all we’ve achieved together, within our hard-working team and along with you, our customers. We are grateful for all of the suggestions and feedback that you’ve given over the past year to help us make our products the best they can be.

As the new year approaches, we look forward to continuing this collaboration and being part of what helps your business to succeed in 2023 and beyond.

Here, we recount some of the highlights from our accomplishments in 2022.

License Statistics Achievements

Our License Statistics team has been digging in during the past year, improving overall user experience and implementing new features based on customer feedback, to ensure you’re able to effectively and efficiently track your organization’s license usage.

Improved UX

Sometimes, it’s the little things that count the most. We strive to make License Statistics easy for anyone to use, and we’re constantly looking for ways to make our user interface more intuitive and ensure that gathered statistics data is readily accessible and understandable. For example, redesigned chart tooltips now include more information, such as duration of license usage, and are formatted using a labeled list that’s easier to read.

Turning attention to detail, we’ve made layout improvements that make it easier to see information about features, users and hosts, and ensured consistency of labels and content in report grids, information panels, and LDAP Schema Settings to help make License Statistics even simpler to use and understand.

More details in reports

Our comprehensive license usage tracking reports now deliver even more data about current and historical usage, helping you uncover details about available licenses, how many licenses are in use or have been borrowed, utilization percentages, total licenses used, denials, and more. In addition to expanding on reported usage data, we’ve added more information to User properties, such as complete LDAP data, that can easily be shown or hidden in report details.

Improvements for License Statistics Administration

For License Statistics administrators, we’ve added more information to license server usage and license detail grids, and added the ability to invalidate (clear) report cache, customize the LDAP Users Import interval, and receive warnings when host resources are below minimum requirements. New connection settings for Remote Monitoring let you restrict the Hostname field entry to hostname or domain, and allow you to force an HTTPS connection.

We’ve also enhanced error reporting, with improved import validation that accounts for errors that occur when importing usage and denials. The level of events tracked in the log is now customizable, so you can track all events, just warnings and errors, or limit the log to error reporting. Furthermore, we’ve made the report easier to use by improving sorting and filtering, and adding the ability to delete all grid contents at once.

In addition, to make your life a little easier, you can now reset the administrator password to the default password with the click of a button using License Statistics Manager.

License Statistics Agent enhancements

Those who use License Statistics Agents will be happy to know that we now support backward compatibility for License Statistics Agent, up to five minor versions older than the License Statistics version. The Agents grid has been improved with additions to data and the ability to disconnect all agents at one time. We also expanded email notifications by adding a new alert for outdated License Statistics Agents, so you can stay on top of your licensing needs.

Expanded support for license managers and the latest platforms

Always broadening our ability to serve our user community’s diverse needs, we’ve added support for Altium Infrastructure Server (AIS/PLS) and GHS license managers (both support remote monitoring and imports), and expanded support for Dassault license manager to allow for monitoring authorization items.

Keeping up with the latest platforms, we now include support for:

  • Windows 11
  • Windows Server 2022
  • Debian 11
  • Ubuntu 22.04

In addition to these more notable new features and enhancements, we’ve made loads of smaller enhancements and fixes that ensure the stability and quality you’ve come to expect from License Statistics.

LM-X Achievements

With all of the strides made with License Statistics over the past year taking the spotlight, let’s not forget about LM-X License Manager! Our developers have also been striving to make sure that LM-X delivers unbeatable security for your applications while ensuring ease of use for your end-users.

Take a look at just a few of the highlights from the past year’s development work on LM-X.

Expanded support

LM-X now supports:

  • Visual Studio 2022
  • UTF-8 on Windows
  • Raspberry Pi

Miscellaneous enhancements

Over the past year, we’ve made enhancements to LM-X that include:

  • Adding a warning to the license server log when an unlimited license will be reserved
  • Making improvements to license server networking
  • Reducing SDK compilation time
  • Resolving an issue with using secure store between different LM-X versions
  • Fixing an issue with the license server allocating too much memory for network buffers
  • Improving stability for systems that are not POSIX-compliant

We celebrate you!

Without you, our customers, we would not be where we are today. Despite challenging economic times, we have been blessed to celebrate a long working relationship with many of you for 5, 10, or even more years. On behalf of our entire team—many of whom have also been with us for over a decade—I wholeheartedly wish you and your families the best, as we look forward to shared successes in the coming year.

Happy holidays to all, and a prosperous New Year!

Henrik Goldman
X-Formation Founder and CEO