Here’s What’s New:

Action1 Platform for cloud-native patch management, remote access, and endpoint management constantly evolves as our development team adds new exciting features. The typical service update cycle happens 3-4 times per year, with each new service update having a brand-new set of features or substantial improvements to the existing aspects of the platform. The following is a history of service updates. Since each service update is truly exciting and unique, we decided to give them exciting and unique names also, naming each one after the beautiful beaches and surf breaks of South Orange County, California.

To see what is coming in the future or to suggest new features, visit our public roadmap.

OCTOBER 2023 – “THOUSAND STEPS”

• Vulnerability Management Enhancement:
  • In addition to previously released third-party application vulnerability detection functionality, Action1 will now detect all CVEs for Windows OS, Microsoft Edge, and Opera browser and show them in the list of vulnerabilities and on the dashboard. This will allow to quickly find all MS Patch Tuesday CVEs, see which endpoints are exposed, and initiate patching
  • Reduced rate of vulnerability detection false positives

• Single Sign-On:
  • Integration of Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) as an identity provider via the Open ID protocol for centralized enterprise access. Utilize existing identities in Entra ID to log in to Action1, benefiting from the extensive identity management capabilities of Entra ID, like quick termination of access and application of conditional access policies for remote employees.
  • The enhanced architecture will support adding more providers in the future via OpenID, including Okta (coming soon!) and Google Workspace.

• Endpoint Group Enhancements:
  • Include or exclude endpoints in Action1 endpoint groups based on their Active Directory Organizational Unit (OU) or AD security group membership. Customers will now be able to utilize their existing AD OU structure or group membership to automatically populate Action1 groups and avoid any manual synchronization work
  • Inclusion and exclusion in groups by any endpoint attribute, such as user, serial number wildcard, model name, reboot required, user name, and more. Note that this release will NOT yet include the ability to filter by installed software, missing updates, or vulnerabilities.
  • Ability to nest groups under other groups via inclusion filters using the new “member of” group filter attribute
  • Ability to exclude contents of one group from another. Example: TEST group has 10 endpoints. PROD group has all endpoints except for the TEST group.

• Custom Branding:
  • Replace the Action1 logo with a custom logo in the Console (top left corner) per organization or for the entire enterprise. Enterprise customers can use their company logo, and MSP customers can use different logos for each customer
  • Customize all end-user prompts (reboot and remote desktop “accept/reject connection”) to show a custom company name and logo instead of Action1 or even translate the entire prompt into another language

• Data Storage Location Choice:
  • Choose a region at signup where Action1 data will be stored: North America or Europe. More regions will be added in the future.

• Software Repository:
  • Action1 App Store will now be called Software Repository. Action1 Software Repository is a continuously updated private application repository that hosts the latest versions of all supported applications to keep your endpoints secure and patched, and provides the ability to fully automate the deployment of these applications
  • 39 new applications have been added to the Software Repository: 1Password, Adobe Animate 2024, Adobe Audition 2024, Adobe Bridge 2024, Adobe Character Animator 2024, Adobe InDesign 2024, Adobe Illustrator 2024, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe MediaEncoder 2024, Adobe Photoshop 2024, Adobe Premiere Pro 2024, Adobe Premiere Rush, Certify The Web, Cisco Webex Meetings, CyberDuck, Dbeaver, Dell SupportAssist for Home PC, DisplayLink Graphics, ESET Endpoint Antivirus, ESET Endpoint Security, ESET Server Security, Git, Google Earth Pro, Lenovo System Update, Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server (17 and 18), Microsoft OLE DB Driver for SQL Server (18 and 19), Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (16-19), Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable (x64+x86), MySqlWorkBench, OBS Studio, pgAdmin4, TeamViewer Host
  • Winget integration script to cover applications not currently included in the Action1 Software Repository but maintained by Winget

• Miscellaneous Improvements
• Last Boot Time endpoint attribute to easily detect endpoints that have not been rebooted in a long time
• Automatically select all endpoints when doing ad-hoc update deployment of missing updates
• Remember default policy settings, such as reboot message, disable automatic Windows updates, and more
• UI terminology changes to ease product understanding, such as App Store is now called Software Repository and Policy is now called Automation.
• 50+ other usability and reliability improvements.

JULY 2023 – “THREE ARCH BAY”

• Vulnerability Management: Features automatic, real-time identification of all vulnerable software installed on managed endpoints with targeted remediation capabilities:
  • Comprehensive Vulnerability Information: Each discovered vulnerability and managed endpoint is accompanied by detailed information such as CVE number, CVSS score, attack vector, etc.
  • Efficient Vulnerability Navigation: One-click drill-down provides insights into all vulnerable endpoints associated with a specific vulnerability, as well as drill-down to all vulnerable applications on a specific endpoint.
  • Automated Vulnerability Remediation: Apply available patches, remove unsupported or legacy software, or centralize documentation of compensating controls for vulnerabilities that lack patches, all in bulk.
  • Broad Software Support: Supports many thousands of software titles scanned for over 100,000 vulnerabilities. Notable exceptions: Opera and Edge web browsers, as well as Windows OS updates, which are all coming soon.

• Enhanced Dashboard: Offers a real-time view of discovered vulnerabilities and current patch compliance levels:
  • SLA-Based Status Overview: Provides rapid status checks of vulnerability remediation and patching based on defined service-level agreements, arranged by vulnerability or patch severity.
  • Comprehensive Summary Information: Allows detailed exploration of endpoints, vulnerabilities, missing updates, reboot status, pending update approvals, and installed apps.
  • Severity and Deadline-Based Vulnerability Breakdown: Offers detailed insights into vulnerabilities and missing updates based on remediation deadlines and severity levels.

• Expanded Third-Party Software Patch Repository: Adds ten new applications to the Action1 App Store to deploy and patch them:
  1. 1. 1Password
     2. Adobe InDesign
     3. Audacity
     4. Bitwarden
     5. DisplayLink Graphics
     6. Jabra Direct
     7. Paint.NET
     8. ShareX
     9. Visual Studio Code
     10. XnView MP

• Automated patch summary digest and update deployment summary via email: Sends configurable daily or weekly summaries of newly released updates applicable to your managed endpoints and the current status of missing updates for each organization.

• SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001:2022 Compliance: Action1 is now officially certified for both, following extensive preparation, infrastructure adjustments, and internal process changes (such as employee background checks, regular vulnerability scanning, and more).

• Move Endpoints: Enables endpoints to be moved between organizations without needing to reinstall the agent.

• Miscellaneous Improvements
• Custom App Size Limit: Raises the upload limit from 5Gb to 32Gb to accommodate the deployment of larger custom applications like CAD or MS Office, along with a four-fold increase in upload speed for custom application packages.
• HTTPS Proxy Support: Action1 agent is now capable of operating over HTTPS proxy, if configured in system settings (except for remote desktop).
• Upgraded Reporting Features: Built-in and custom software inventory reports can now include the endpoint OS version as a report column.
• Usability Improvements: Policy catch-up period and reboot update deadline can now be specified in any number of minutes, hours, or days (up to 30 days).
• Unlimited Endpoint Groups: Allows for an unlimited number of endpoint groups per organization (previously 50).
• Service Reliability Improvements: Dozens of service enhancements to eliminate errors, prevent outages, and reduce intermittent slow responsiveness.

APRIL 2023 – “MONARCH BAY”

• Displaying policy history for specific endpoints, including the currently running policies. This improvement eliminates the need to sift through the entire policy history to identify previously applied policies.

• 20 new applications added to the Action1 App Store, based on user feedback:
  1. 1. Dell Command | Update
     2. Mozilla Firefox ESR
     3. Libre Office
     4. PeaZip
     5. Adobe Acrobat MUI
     6. TightVNC
     7. Adobe Creative Cloud
     8. Adobe Aminate
     9. Adobe Audition
     10. Adobe Bridge
     11. Adobe Character Animator
     12. Adobe Dreamweaver
     13. Adobe Illustrator
     14. Adobe Lightroom Classic
     15. Adobe Media Encoder
     16. Adobe Photoshop
     17. Adobe Premiere Pro
     18. GIMP
     19. WinMerge by Thingamahoochie Software
     20. PDFCreator by pdfforge

• Introducing new App Store and internal agent features and fixes to support an expanding range of App Store applications. Our primary goal remains to continually add more third-party applications, enabling deployment and patching without the need to build and maintain custom applications.

• A new Action1 agent deployment option within Action1 Deployer, which allows for the exclusion of workstations and the installation of the agent exclusively on servers and domain controllers (DCs).

• Default row count display memory in all Action1 Console views, enhancing user experience through customized preferences.

• Performance optimizations for P2P app and patch distribution, aimed at minimizing external bandwidth usage and improving overall efficiency.

• Over 100 service reliability improvements eliminate errors, outages, and intermittent slow responsiveness.

JANUARY 2023 – “Salt Creek” – UPDATE 1

• Configurable endpoint offline/online alerts to automatically email specified Action1 users when any endpoint in a chosen endpoint group becomes disconnected for more than X number of minutes and optionally notify again when it comes back online.

• The new report called “Missing Third-Party and Windows Updates” combines third-party updates together with Windows updates.

• The ability to uninstall all versions of a product at once from the entire network. For example, if your organization wants to standardize on Google Chrome, you can uninstall all versions of Mozilla Firefox browsers or vice versa. The new Uninstall App wizard now shows “all versions” by default when you search for an app to uninstall. It also continues to offer an option to uninstall just one specific version, as well as uninstall all versions below a certain specified version.

• Import endpoints from a CSV file to quickly populate endpoint groups with endpoints without manually adding them.

• The remote access feature was improved to fully support the copying and pasting of characters of most world languages, such as Polish, German, Chinese and more. No more issues with umlauts and hieroglyphs for our customers around the world.

• This update includes a few dozen of quality improvements, including remote access reliability.

December 2022 – “Salt Creek”

• Patch Management Dashboard provides comprehensive visualization on the current state of patch compliance across your organization, showing the percentage of endpoints needing critical updates, new updates needing approval, and pending reboots required to complete patching – all with drill down to the actual endpoints and updates.

• Granular update deployment policies to control the update sources, types, and security severities, as well as include or exclude certain updates by name or vendor wildcards. This allows configuring your patching policies to be as specific as your organization requires. To deploy all or select patches matching specified criteria – for example:
• Include or exclude security updates by severity, such as deploying critical updates sooner than lower-severity updates;
• Deploy Windows Defender definition updates multiple times per day, separate from running all other update policies;
• Include or exclude drivers/firmware updates, Windows feature updates, non-critical updates, and more;
• Selectively deploy only third-party software patches, mandatory or optional OS updates, or any three types in combination;
• Automatically or manually approve and deploy new updates based on specified filters;
• Automatic criteria-based update approval after a specified number of days to avoid approval of untested updates too soon;
• Customizable reboot options based on update type or security severity, such as requiring a shorter time frame for critical updates and more relaxed for non-critical.

• Extended Endpoint Details View that shows the installed applications, missing updates, and the hardware information individually for each endpoint in one customizable single pane of glass view. The per-endpoint information includes:
• Installed applications: name, vendor, version, update status;
• Missing Windows and third-party updates;
• OS type and version, reboot status, customizable computer name and comment, user name;
• Hardware information: manufacturer and serial number, MAC address, disk, memory, CPU, network adapter;
• The ability to customize view columns is coming in the next release.

• Switchable UI dark mode.

• Redesigned Update Approval view:
• Grouping of missing third-party updates by application, showing only the latest available version by default;
• Additional update details: KB number, CVE, reboot requirement, update size, optional or recommended.

• Scheduled patch compliance report to simplify tracking of your patch compliance status on a regular basis.

• Improved reliability of agent operations:
• Automatic repair of Windows Update Agent (self-healing) whenever the Windows update database becomes corrupted;
• Agent installation via Group Policy Software Installation is now fully supported in addition to using GPO startup scripts.

• Over 400 miscellaneous improvements, including:
• Redesigned compact view layouts to show more lines of data on one screen;
• The ability to rename Action1 enterprise;
• The ability to delete custom data sources;
• Self-explaining UI elements to simplify new user onboarding;
• Customizable Action1 console session timeout (default is 30 minutes);
• Improved policy execution progress reporting;
• One common policy concept instead of two confusing entities (actions and policies);
• Showing endpoint groups assigned to a policy without editing the policy;
• The ability to disable the remote access feature for an endpoint group, an organization, or the entire enterprise;

June 2022 — “Strand”

• ^ The Script Library feature makes it easy to re-use commonly utilized scripts to automate policy-based endpoint management and remediation of issues:
• ^ Over 20 ready-to-use built-in scripts are already included in the Script Library, with more to be added regularly in the future based on user feedback.
• ^ Built-in scripts include remote wipe of a lost or stolen device, turn the firewall on or off, system restore, system file checker (SFC), local password reset, disk space cleanup, Windows Update Agent repair, flush DNS cache, enable or disable USB, and more.
• ^ Users can add custom scripts to the Script Library to apply management policies and run scheduled actions specific to their environments.
• ^ The legacy “Run Command” and “Run PowerShell” actions were combined into one “Run Script” action with a choice of a scripting language.
• ^ The endpoint rename function (editable endpoint name) works in addition to having a custom endpoint comment field. All the views and reports show the new name. The original device name remains in the endpoint details.
• ^ Multiple UI performance optimizations for fast and smooth user experience.
• ^ Manually apply an existing policy once to specified endpoints or groups without waiting for its scheduled time. This new function simplifies testing new policies or applying them to newly added endpoints.
• ^ Schedule policies by week numbers (e.g., “deploy updates every THIRD Sunday” or “reboot every SECOND Friday”).
• ^ Customize missed schedule expiration for actions and policies (“catch up timeout”) for powered-off endpoints from the default 24 hours to any user-defined timeout. Such as rebooting all endpoints that are online now or will be online within the next 2 hours (but not later than 2 hours).
• ^ Enhanced agent deployment experience using Action1 Deployer (formerly Action1 Connector) with troubleshooting features and a more intuitive UI.
• ^ Improved built-in report ‘Antivirus Status’ (under Endpoint Security), which now detects most industry-leading antivirus products on Windows 10/11 and Windows Defender, Sophos, and Bitdefender on Windows Server.
• ^ New built-in report for BitLocker key management.
• ^ New built-in endpoint fields: MAC address and serial number, both visible in the endpoint details.
• ^ New UI performance optimizations for an even faster and smoother user experience.
• ^ More reliable and smooth Remote Desktop experience.
• ^ Over 100 service reliability improvements eliminate errors, outages, and intermittent slow responsiveness.

See The “Strand” update In Action

Update History:

March 2022 — “Headlands”

• ^ Improved Action1 agent deployment experience:
• ^ Simplified and more intuitive process for deploying new agents.
• ^ Default “New Endpoint” group for newly added endpoints to easily distinguish them from existing endpoints.
• ^ New built-in report ‘Antivirus Status’ (under Endpoint Security), which shows the antivirus status for every endpoint in the network. Allows one to quickly identify endpoints that either don’t have any antivirus product enabled, or are running with an outdated antivirus definition. Review the current antivirus status everywhere and receive alerts when someone disables antivirus on any of your managed endpoints.
• ^ Multiple UI performance optimizations for fast and smooth user experience.
• ^ Single sign on experience for the Roadmap & Feedback system at action1.com/roadmap to allow users logged into Action1 Console to provide their feedback and vote for upcoming features without creating another set of login credentials. We highly encourage everyone to start using this new feedback system to help us prioritize feature development and influence the future of Action1.
• ^ Support for Windows Server 2022.
• ^ Over 40 service reliability improvements aiming to further reduce any future service outages and/or slowdowns.

February 2022 — “Baby Beach”

• ^ The new editable endpoint comment field allows to specify any custom information about an endpoint, such as its description, location, owner, etc.
• ^ Endpoints view now supports search by username to quickly locate user’s endpoint in Action1 when users ask for remote assistance or other help.
• ^ The new feedback tracking system at action1.com/roadmap accepts feature suggestions and votes for already suggested features to help Action1 prioritize their development.
• ^ 100+ performance and stability updates for substantially improved service reliability.

December 2021 — “Doheny”

• ^ Custom report authoring to allow the creation of new reports and customization of any existing reports to your needs.
• ^ Display of the most recently logged-on user for every endpoint will simplify user assistance.
• ^ Customizable remote desktop settings to specify whether to prompt the remote users or not, and how much time to give the user to decided to accept or decline the remote connection request.
• ^ Installed Updates summary view showing which updates are installed on your entire network, with an ability to drill down see which endpoints have which updates.
• ^ Display of the Windows version details (such as 21H1, 21H2 etc) in the endpoint views.
• ^ OAuth 2.0 API login support for automated RESTful API access and scripting.
• ^ Multi-factor authentication via Microsoft Authenticator, Authy, Google Authenticator, Duo, and other apps.
• ^ Ease of use improvements in software deployment functionality to simplify the deployment of applications not available as built-in apps in the Action1 App Store:
• ^ Improved process of custom app authoring, which now provides highly detailed information at install time about possible errors in version number and app name match settings, suggesting the changes needed to fix such errors.
• ^ Support for multi-file application setups packed in ZIP archives without the need to create self-extracting ZIP archives.
• ^ Support for the MSI transforms feature. Now you can put an MST file (such as transforms.mst) along with the MSI file into a ZIP archive and specify TRANSFORMS=transforms.mst in the additional installation settings.
• ^ Numerous smaller improvements in the reliability of patch deployment, UI, agents, and other areas of functionality.

May 2021 — “Capo Beach”

• ^ Management of applications installed by non-administrative users in their own user profiles. Such apps can now be securely uninstalled in the non-privileged user’s context to avoid any escalations of privileges. This allows IT administrators to remove all unsupported user applications and switch to machine-wide installs supported and updated via Action1.
• ^ Automated, approval-based deployment of Windows Feature Updates, such as updating to Windows 10 20H2.
• ^ Streamlined patch management for drivers and firmware updates.
• ^ New enhanced reboot functionality allows the currently logged on user to postpone a reboot after installing updates up to a maximum time defined by the IT administrator in order to minimize business disruptions or automatically reboot if no users are currently logged.
• ^ Multiple user experience and usability improvements.
• ^ 250+ improvements and reliability updates.

March 2021 — “Poche Beach”

• ^ Multiple Action1 user accounts with access to the same or multiple organizations, to avoid sharing of login credentials between administrators and other users of Action1 within one enterprise or managed service provider.
• ^ Role-based Access Control (RBAC) to define granular levels of access for each user account at each managed organization. For example, allow some users to change the configuration at a subset of organizations while giving view-only access to the others.
• ^ Endpoint groups with manual and automatic inclusion of endpoints. Automatic inclusion adds all endpoints matching certain name patterns (e.g. *LAPTOP*), types of operating systems or located in a certain network (defined by IP address range or CIDR notation).
• ^ Different patch management and software deployment policies based on endpoint groups. Such as immediate deployment of patches for a test group of endpoints and approval-based deployment for the rest of your organization.
• ^ Bypass patch approval for patches based on severity, such as deploy all Critical patches automatically, without manual approval.
• ^ While bypassing approval, automatically delay deployment of patches by certain number of days, to avoid installing unproven newly released patches that can disrupt your business operations. For example, automatically deploy all critical updates 3 days after their release by an OS or app vendor.
• ^ Full control over reboots during app and patch deployment: suppress reboots entirely or reboot automatically, while giving your users the ability to postpone by a few hours or days. Or use a separate reboot schedule to avoid any disruptions of users during business hours, while still ensuring that the updates get installed.
• ^New Action1 agent deployment options:
• ^ Provide agent download link directly to your end users (such as via email) to speed up adoption of Action1 for management of devices of remote employees who don’t connect to your corporate network.
• ^ Specify one or more comma-separated Active Directory organizational units (OUs) to limit the scope of endpoint discovery for automatic agent deployment (instead of always deploying to the entire domain).
• ^ Over 600 minor improvements and bugfixes, such as support for daylight savings time, uploading of very large installation files, responsiveness of UI views, stability etc.

January 2021 — “North Beach San Clemente”

• ^ Free edition with no limitations up to 100 endpoints: includes everything Action1 provides at no charge and no ads shown.
• ^ MSI (Windows Installer) in addition to EXE -based installer, to enable agent deployment via Group Policy or any other 3rd party software deployment tools.
• ^ Multiple enhancements in the Remote Desktop feature:
• ^ If a remote endpoint has multiple monitors, Action1 will allow switching between them instead of showing all monitors at the same time.
• ^ Skips the 15-second wait to accept connection by remote user if no one is logged on interactively or screen is locked on a remote endpoint.
• ^ Will not automatically lock screen upon disconnection if a remote user was logged on interactively when the connection was established.
• ^ Numerous performance improvements and bug fixes to improve connection quality and reliability.

October 2020 — “El Portal”

• ^ Multi tenancy for MSP and larger enterprises : create multiple organizations under one Action1 account with fully separate list of managed endpoints and data.
• ^ Peer-to-peer software distribution technology that optimizes the usage of network traffic when large software packages are downloaded.
• ^ Real-time action execution status reporting: see the progress of all actions as they are being run and report completion status to track deployment and patching progress in real-time.
• ^ Over 100 usability, performance and reliability improvements in all aspects of the platform.

July 2020 — “T-Street”

• ^ Remote desktop access: connect to any managed endpoints remotely, see screen, control keyboard and mouse — all without using any 3rd party agents or tools.
• ^ Free edition with no limitations up to 10 endpoints: includes everything Action1 provides at no charge and no ads shown.
• ^ Software uninstall action that requires no configuration in most cases — just uninstall and forget.
• ^ Ability to uninstall unneeded Action1 agents remotely.
• ^ Multiple Active Directory domains for agent deployment.
• ^ Automatic recovery or repair of agents that fail for any reason.

April 2020 — “Lost Winds”

• ^ Support for Windows updates in addition to 3rd party updates — see all types of updates in one unified view.
• ^ Automatic patch management: approve patches for deployment and specify maintenance windows to deploy.
• ^ RESTful API available to customers: develop automation scripts that access all functionality available in Action1 Console.
• ^ Completely new reporting experience: cached/live data, summary reports, real-time search, new export options.
• ^ New app store packages: Zoom, Microsoft Teams.

December 2019 — “Calafia”

• ^ App deployment via enterprise App Store: inventory of applications ready for deployments, silent install/uninstall switches, hosted binary packages, version info, etc.
• ^ 15 fully maintained built-in app packages maintained by Action1: major web browsers (Google Chrome, Opera, Firefox), instant messengers, Java, Adobe products, remote access tools and more.
• ^ Ability to create custom app package with all files hosted in Action1 Cloud.
• ^ Manual patch management with the ability deploy individual 3rd party software patches.
• ^ Multi-factor authentication for Action1 logins.

October 2019 — “Tresles”

• ^ Fully redeveloped UI experience: modern, responsive design, asynchronous view refresh without full reloading.
• ^ Ability to schedule actions to run at certain times or use repeated scheduling (monthly, weekly, etc).
• ^ New type of actions: reboot, run script, deploy app, uninstall app.
• ^ View all installed applications across the entire network in real-time, summarize by app name, see all versions installed, filter, sort, etc.
• ^ Simplified agent deployment methodology with unattended installation options.
• ^ Deployment of agents to all computers in Active Directory domain, with the ability to exclude DCs and servers.

March 2019 — “San Onofre”

• ^ Ability to execute actions: install/uninstall software, install updates, refresh GPO, run scripts, etc.
• ^ Automatic agent deployment with Action1 Connector.
• ^ 100 more predefined reports: installed software, hardware, endpoint configuration, network settings, running processes, and more.

August 2018 — “Trails”

• ^ Initial release with basic functionality — fully Cloud-based endpoint management framework.
• ^ Reporting on endpoint configurations with more than 100 predefined reports out of the box.
• ^ Outbound only connectivity via TCP/IP with no firewall configuration needed for agents.