ScriptLogic has today released a new version of its Desktop Authority management suite, adding support for 64bit platforms, improved reporting capabilities and extended support for controlling USB devices connected to client systems.

Desktop Authority version 7.7 is available immediately as a free update for existing customers. It adds support for 64bit Windows operating systems on both the client desktop and the host server, including Windows Server 2003, Vista and Windows XP x64 Edition.

This will greatly benefit firms running Terminal Services or Citrix sessions, according to Jon Rolls, director of product management at ScriptLogic. “You can support many more users with 64bit servers, and we’ve had some demand for customers looking to manage virtual desktops this way,” he said.

Other vital updates concern endpoint security and the ability to generate custom reports to highlight key aspects of a company’s inventory. ScriptLogic has addressed the latter with a custom report wizard flexible enough to let administrators quickly build a report listing all desktops with a certain memory size, for example.

“It saves you ever having to see the actual SQL query that underpins the report,” said Rolls.

With data security an ongoing concern in businesses, the USB and port security feature of Desktop Authority has been extended to support both whitelists and blacklists of peripherals that are allowed or blocked. This can block a whole class of devices, such as music players, or specific models of device. Administrators can even whitelist only the individual serial numbers of USB memory sticks they have issued to staff, Rolls said.

On top of this, auditing has been beefed up so that firms can track when a user has been denied access, as well as every file that each user has copied to an external storage device.

Desktop Authority 7.7 also enhances the suite’s patch management capabilities, so it can automatically patch software such as Firefox, Apache and Thunderbird. It even adds a special facility to patch highly secure environments that are not connected to the internet.

Administrators can use it to fetch available patches from ScriptLogic’s web site and create an update DVD that is then used to apply all the patches to the secure network.
Desktop Authority licensing starts at £26 per seat before volume discounts.