[PacketFence-devel] PacketFence v6 - What's Coming!

[Ludovic M. <lma...@in...>]

Hello everybody,

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:

 1. *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;
 2. *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;
 3. *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;
 4. *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;
 5. *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;
 6. *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!

Best regards,

-- 
Ludovic Marcotte
lma...@in...  ::  +1.514.755.3630  ::  http://inverse.ca
Inverse inc. :: Leaders behind SOGo (http://sogo.nu) and PacketFence (http://packetfence.org)