Lanboss Development Principles
Lanboss aims to make its products the most viable choice for network auditing, monitoring, management and security. We achieve our aims by making our products comprehensive, use the least amount of resources possible and by making product pertience our priorities.Product Pertinence
Apart from being within the European time zone, Lanboss offers the added benefit that the majority of our roadmap planning and development take place within the UK, meaning that we are able to react quickly to new client requirements.Example of this was the Conficker virus that wreaked havoc on over 9 million workstations. Lanboss was able to identify a method of removing the virus and was able to roll this out across client estates within a day of the cure becoming available!
Comprehensive Products
All Lanboss products work on a single core system and this includes a powerful Console incorporating summaries, reporting, query builder and detailed views of the estate. No other software prodcuts or licenses need to be acquired to run your Lanboss System as your Lanboss products include SQL database server licenses and reporting tools.Your products are incremental too, starting with the Workstation Auditor; it is possible to add full workstation monitoring and management with products like DataCop, DeviceCop and Workstation Manager, without having to do much more than applying the necessary licenses.
Impact Sensitive
Most network management tools struggle in low bandwidth conditions. The predominant reason for this is down to the communications methods used in those products. Lanboss has developed its own IP-based protocol stack that allows it to tightly control the bandwidth use of its products. The protocol stack has been optimised for low bandwidth conditions, without noticeable degradation of other services like email and web browsing.The agent communications is typically low priority and opportunistic. The agents themselves are tamper proof, auto-healing and tiny in size, a typical local client implementation takes under 1.2MB of transfer, which is smaller than the Windows ‘Welcome’ application. The agents themselves have been written to operate at idle priority and, like the bandwidth impact, the machine utilisation is close to negligible.
Quantum Leaps
There have been a number of significant technical steps Lanboss has taken over the years of product development which have helped to make our products formidible in their field. A short list of our major achievements follows:| ◊ | IP-based protocol stack | At v2, we built the first iteration of our communications protocol. This has proved to be a very good decision as the products are now some of the most efficient over the network. By Uniboss Version 4, the protocol had been through 5 major iterations of optimisation and in v5 there will be further improvements. |
| ◊ | Super Scalable Database | Early in the v3.x roadmap a decision was made to build the database server into our products directly, meaning that database setup and configuration was no longer needed. It also gave us a dedicated database server that was tuned specifically to our requirements, which today translates into a single server being able to cater for 10,000 workstations! |
| ◊ | Uniboss unified platform | By v4.0 we got to the point that it was now possible to unify many of the products' communications, database tables, reporting and control into a single platform. Arguably the most significant step Lanboss has taken to date, the creation of Uniboss has formalised much of the previous developments and set the precident for all future developments. |
| ◊ | Script Language | By v4.0 we got to the point that it was now possible to unify many of the products' communications, database tables, reporting and control into a single platform. Arguably the most significant step Lanboss has taken to date, the creation of Uniboss has formalised much of the previous developments and set the precident for all future developments. |
| ◊ | Workflow engine | Management should not be a matter of continually poring over report after report, v4.0 we got to the point that it was now possible to unify many of the products' communications, database tables, reporting and control into a single platform. Arguably the most significant step Lanboss has taken to date, the creation of Uniboss has formalised much of the previous developments and set the precident for all future developments. |
The relative merits of each of these items and their significance in the products today will always be debated internally at Lanboss, but one thing is certain, the products have had the necessary focus and development effort necessary to make a formidible suite of tools.
And the best part? Well that's going straight into the v5 developments!