In case you hadn't heard, we will be upgrading our platform (Centrify Identity Service and Centrify Privilege Service) to version 16.6 this weekend (Saturday, June 18th).   This release focuses primarily on performance improvements, but we've also added some great new capabilities.  The complete list of new features is available in the release notes, but as always I will tell you about the most important features here:

Improved RADIUS Support

As you probably know, our platform allows you to extend our MFA solution to any RADIUS client.  When we first released this capability (in the 16.2 release), the Admin would need to specify which authentication mechanism would need to be used for all of the users.  With 16.6, we have augmented this feature to leverage our authentication profiles (allowing the user to choose from a list of supported authentication mechanisms).

NOTE: When using this feature, Centrify will contact the user to authenticate but the user must manually type in the code that is sent to respond.

Smart Card and Derived Credentials Support

You may have heard us talk about Smart Card support and Derived Credentials in the past.  Smart Card support allows users to login to the service with a Smart Card and a PIN in lieu of a username and password.  Derived Credentials allows a user to access Smart Card enabled services through a mobile device without physically attaching the Smart Card.  We do this by issuing a certificate to the device that is derived from the physical card (user must request the certificate through the User Portal while logged in with their Smart Card).

These features have been in popular demand from our government and other high-security-minded customers for some time. In the past, if a customer wanted to be able to login to our service and their apps using Smart Cards our Ops team would need to manually enable the feature for the customer.  With this release, Smart Cards and Derived Credentials can now be self-configured by our end customers.  Please note that these are premium features and are only available to customers who have purchased Centrify Identiy Service App+ Edition or Centrify Privilege Service.   If you have a version of the product that does not have these features but you want to test out these new capabilities, please contact your Account team.

New Mac Agent

Last, but certainly not least, with 16.6 we have a new Mac agent for enrolling Macs with the service.  You're probably thinking, big deal, you already had an agent.  This is true...but, this one is much cooler as it offers additional capabilities above and beyond what we could do in the past.  With the new agent, we've added 3 features:

1. We have a policy that the Admin can set which prompts the user to enroll their Mac when logging into the User Portal (this policy only prompts users logging in on a Mac and will not prompt the user if he/she has already enrolled, or dismissed the prompt and selected "Do not ask me again"
2. The new agent enables location reporting (so the user can see where the Mac is on a map)
3. This agent enables our "True SSO" feature (previously only available on mobile devices), which enables SSO (zero sign-on, actually) to the User Portal and to SAML apps without having to login to the portal first! 

We hope you enjoy these new features and look forward to hearing your feedback!