This document describes the most important changes that a 8.0 admin should be aware of in order to take advantage of the new features in 8.1. New features are described with 8.0 as a point of reference, and those that are essentially unchanged will not be mentioned here.
If you are an on prem customer upgrading from an earlier version, read the Server Upgrade 7.x to 8.0 document, as it will give detailed steps including what to expect once you have upgraded.
While this is a major release, this initial dot zero version doesn't have a great deal of customer visible new features. A large number of back end enhancements have taken place in conjunction with the 12.1 release of TD Work Management which sets the stage for point releases that actually add new functionality to follow quickly.
Various enhancements and optimizations have taken place on the back end. The noticeable impact of these is that your Usage reports should be quite a bit faster than they were before. Those customers that use the integration with TD Work Management will also have noted the sync is much faster now. It may not be shiny on the surface, but it's a foundational quality of daily operation enhancement we are very pleased about. Soon we will have a new update that includes a redesigned integration experience between ITAM and WorkManagement that is easier and more flexible than ever.
To again align our product catalogue under the TeamDynamix umbrella, the default UX for new instances (available option in Settings for existing customers) mimics the visual look of the "TDNext" new UX released earlier this year. You can choose the Lilac color scheme and enable the TeamDynamix Font and Layout option to see this. In addition, we have adopted the "slide out" convention of our ITSM platform for Detail pages. When you click on a computer, purchase, etc record you will now find the detail pane slides out from the right side (and can be resized) rather than opening in the main pane. This allows you on a sufficiently wide screen to look at the details of a record while still seeing the list of records as well.
Parts of this functionality were introduced before, but 8.1 finalizes this. When a domain is hit in a supported web browser on a client with the ITAM agent, that is captured and compared to the definitions we have in PRS. So much like with desktop applications we will now show on the Manage page any items that have been "seen" in use in the organization in the Attention status. This way you know that Saas solution has been used on a computer and can choose if you want to start tracking usage.
Getting computers organized into divisions is a foundational concept of the ITAM platform. Historically a popular method to automate this was using Active Directory. Unfortunately that is usually not available due to security when using our hosted solution, and Azure does not have an OU structure. Computer names are often leveraged as a result if there is a well established naming convention. However we have seen sites with dozens of rules created to account for their organizational structure which is rather bulky. We have also seen names that need to be parsed in a more complex manner than a simple name check can facilitate. With this release there is a new method that can have a single Action that will do all the work via a lookup table, and it can use regular expressions so you can do much more complex name parsing.
Our One Click reports are very convenient. Perhaps too convenient at large customer sites. We have seen dozens of these pre-built reports in some cases so scrolling the list for the one you want starts to be just as tedious as building the report each time. Now you can Favorite a one click report so it floats to the top of the Reports page. This is a per user setting.
There is a steadily decreasing set of reasons you need to use KeyConfigure instead of the web interface. Clearing out Admin Alerts was one of them, but this is now in the web interface. Given proper rights you can see the bell in the upper right to view and clear these alerts. In the web this list will also show current running and recently completed Scripts.
Here are a few additional items of interest. As always we have made many other small improvements which may not be listed here at all. As new features may be added in point releases over time, those of note will get added below as well.
See our Release Blog for more details on each version.