We are pleased to announce the general availability of AuthAnvil Two Factor Auth 5.0 and AuthAnvil Single Sign On 3.6!
AuthAnvil Two Factor Auth has went through a major architectural change. This gives us the ability to better scale the solution for some of our larger clients that are rolling AuthAnvil out for protection of cloud services like Office 365.
Here is a list of the key changes:
- Better redundancy support. We now support full clustering and the ability of using teamed web servers with Network Load Balancing (NLB).
- Introduction of support for Windows Azure VMs. The backend now supports the ability to roll out Azure instances of AuthAnvil on Windows Server 2012 virtual machines. More details will following in the coming months on how you can build a highly reliable, redundant AuthAnvil environment in Windows Azure for less than the cost of a typical hosted colo box.
- SQL Auth. We have updated our SQL support to use SQL authentication, allowing you to use services like SQL Azure to get cloud based database clustering if you so desire.
- .NET 4.0. We have taken advantage of Microsoft's .NET Framework 4.0 which has allowed us access to new functionality and capabilities in our code base, reducing some more complex code we used to have to manage.
- Windows Server 2003 no longer supported going forward. As of v5.0, we no longer are testing against Windows Server 2003 for the Server components. Agents will continue to be supported. You will need to continue to use AuthAnvil Two Factor Auth v4.6 if you wish to have AuthAnvil run in Windows Server 2003 environments.
- Legacy URL removed. v5.0 now removes backwards URL compatibility for older installations. If you use software that hardcodes paths, you will need to ensure you download our documentation on how to repair this.
The last two bullets are extremely important. We have decided based on the metrics we are seeing that continuing to support Windows Server 2003 and .NET 2.0 did not make sense to us. From a security perspective and usability perspecting the newer generations of Windows Server with .NET 4.0 is by far a better solution. We will continue to support AuthAnvil Two Factor Auth 4.6 for three more release cycles, allowing customers to migrate off to newer servers in the next year or so as required. We will NOT support new installations of the server components onto Windows Server 2003.
If the legacy URL affects you (most Autotask users would be a good example), we have you covered with some repair scripts. Please look at our warning about this change for more information. We have been telling you for some time now to stop using the old URLs. With this release we have finally removed it.
AuthAnvil Single Sign On has went through some major changes itself. These include:
- Better support for Lync clients in Office 365. There were some issues with how this was functioning, and we have resolved that with the introduction of ActiveSync keys for Lync.
- Support for Internet Explorer 10. We have updated the SSO Portal to support IE10 rendering to allow for a better touch experience.
- Office 365 is now easily "detachable". We have made it easy to detach federation from Office 365 with the click of a single button. Now you can easily try AuthAnvil with your Office 365 account and remove it with little risk. No special PowerShell management required.
- Huge performance improvements. We have updated the management of SSO to better handle thousands of concurrent users, deemed required when used with cloud services like Office 365, MS Dynamics Online and Salesforce.com.
There are several other performance enhancements and bug fixes to both products that have also been rolled up to make your experience with our software better. All of this is rolled up in the main installers. If you need any questions or need assistance in upgrading, please visit www.scorpionsoft.com/help.
Let us know what you think of the new updates!
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