In case you hadn't heard, we will be upgrading our platform (Centrify Application Services and Centrify Infrastructure Services) to version 17.7 this weekend (Saturday, August 12th).  The complete list of new features is available in the release notes, but as always I will tell you about my favorites here:

Updates to User Portal

While these changes are pretty minor, I wanted to point them out since your end-users will likely discover them.  In the User Portal, we've made the following changes:

1. We've moved the "Settings Menu" from a drop-down under user name to a gear icon that displays on the Apps and Devices pages.  This menu now includes the following options:
   
   1. Ability to set the Default Filter for displaying apps
   2. Ability to set the app layout (no longer a toggle button on the Apps page to switch between Grouped and Grid view)
   3. Ability for user to opt-out of device location tracking
2. We updated the Account Page  
   1. Cleaner design of the Security Settings page
   2. Passcodes feature has been removed from the Security Settings page and now has its own tab
3. We've also refreshed the Activity Page to include
   1.  A Map Widget showing where you've authenticated from (note map is based on IP address)
   2. Login counter showing total logins over the past 10 days
   3. Denied Login counter showing failed logins over the past 10 days
   4. App Usage showing how many times apps have been launched
   5. Activity Stream showing interactions with the platform grouped by day

SCIM Provisioning (Preview)

I'm very excited to announce that we have added SCIM support for provisioning in our platform.  If you're not familiar with SCIM, it's a standard for provisioning (just like SAML and OpenID Connect are standards for SSO).  Our custom templates for SAML and OpenID Connect have been updated to include a Provisioning (Preview) tab.  If you are using an application that supports SCIM, you can now enable provisioning for that application on your own. 

I'd also like to point out that this has been added as an update to the template; so if you've already added your own applications through the custom template in the past, and those applications support SCIM, you can enable provisioning for those apps without having to redeploy the application.

Centrify Browser Extension Pinning (Preview)

Finally, we've had customers ask us to be able to control if and when their end-users get prompted to update the Centrify Browser Extension so that users don't have to update their endpoints with every release.  Moving forward, we will give you the control to determine the browser extension version used by your organization via a new policy that enables you to Set the Browser Extension Version.  With this policy, you can choose between:

• Latest Version (default behavior, where users are always prompted to update the browser extension if a new one is available)
• Specific Version Number (starting with 17.7, you will be able to set the browser extension so that users do not need to upgrade their extension when subsequent releases come out)

With this feature enabled, the logic in the User Portal to prompt for an update to the extension relies on the policy setting instead of the current release version.  As for the extension versions that will appear in the list, you will always see the current version, and any versions that you have set in an active policy.  To support this, we also made a change to the Downloads page to give you the ability to download older versions of the browser extension (provided that you are using an older version in an existing policy set).

As a best practice for using this feature, we recommend setting up 2 Roles, one for "Early Adopters" and another for "Production Users" and setting the Production Users to a Specific Version and your Early Adopters to "Latest Version".  Using this methodology, you can test the browser extension yourself with a test group before asking your users to update (by then updating the policy set for Production Users to the version that was tested and approved by your Early Adopters).

Let me point out a few final things regarding this feature:

1. Pinning is not supported on Chrome (because Chrome extensions come from the Google Chrome Store, where only a single extension can be maintained)
2. This preview feature needs to be enabled by Centrify.  If you would like to have it enabled in your tenant, please contact Support.
3. We intend to add this feature through a hotfix prior to 17.8 so that you can pin your browser extension before our next  release.
4. Once enabled, you will see this policy under Policies > Application Policies > User Settings

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