PacketFence v6 - What's Coming!
December 18, 2015

The 2015 year has been a great one for PacketFence. We’ve seen the v5 release which brought Fingerbank and WMI integration, multimaster and PKI support, a brand new dashboard and much more. PacketFence did set the bar high for the competition.

We prepare to do this once again with the upcoming v6 release of PacketFence. So far, here is what we plan to include in it:

    * Performance Improvements - a never-ending task! We want to keep making PacketFence slimmer and faster. We’ve seen, in some of our deployments in 2015, PacketFence handling more than 1,500 authentications per second - that’s a lot but we can do more and we will have to handle more as the number of endpoints per user will keep increasing; * Flexible Captive Portal - highly personalized captive portal should be created in a couple of mouse-clicks, and PacketFence will allow you to do that. We will provide new templates and CSS files to ease that process, while improving the appearance of the current default portal and making it responsive for all endpoints; * Administration Interface Improvements - You might recall that in PacketFence v4, we came up with a brand new Web admin interface for PacketFence - based on the Catalyst and Bootstrap frameworks. We’ll proceed with a nice revamp of the Web interface by upgrading Bootstrap, restructuring the JavaScript code, introducing configuration wizards and simplifying the current administration modules we have; * Logging and Auditing - a critical feature in any important software solution. With the addition of the RADIUS auditing log for PacketFence v5.6, a fair amount of work has already been accomplished but more is to come for v6 for complete traceability of events occurring on a network and easing the process to get that information quickly; * Better Reports - PacketFence already comes with some reports but there is a need to expose a lot more information that PacketFence has on the network, its endpoints and users through nice reports. We plan to add many more for v6 - we have listened to you; * Flexible API - the current version of PacketFence already include many APIs but we plan to add more to ease the integration process with MDM, IDS and firewall solutions. It will also allow people to integrate their homemade solutions with PacketFence without relying on fragile database accesses.
Work has already started and it’ll keep us pretty busy!

Finally, the Inverse team would like to wish you all Happy Holidays - let the 2016 year be a great one for PacketFence once again!

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