Code and Concept Monthly – July ’18

Jul 24, 2018 | Code and Concept Monthly, Live Phishing Training, Micro Focus, Micro Focus Filr, Micro Focus Vibe, Mobility, Novell, Novell Filr, Novell Vibe

The summer slump – or summer holiday season – is almost upon us, but still there is a lot going on to be talked about! Check out the events of the near future: on July 25th, you can grab your seat in an interesting webinar – Filr Micro Focus 3.4 has been released, and there are many improvements to take advantage of.

On the topic of security: the Live-Phishing Awareness Campaign in Kiel has led to a substantial response in media, resulting in many municipalities becoming more aware of the fact that citizens have a right to data protection.

Advances in digital transformation: Micro Focus Vibe and Micro Focus Filr can create a competitive advantage in this field for all IT-supported organizations.

Issues resolved: an FTF for Micro Focus Vibe 4.0.4 brings fixes for two issues in the registration/authentication area.

Our Use Case Spotlight will be covering Filr this month, and how Filr can be used to make your daily work life easier and to speed up existing processes.

 

Filr 3.4 Webinar July 25th 2019

To make sure that you find a webinar time slot that suits you, no matter where you are, the webinar will be held in three time slots:

In this webinar, the product team will be presenting and demonstrating the new features that have found their way into the product with the newest release Filr 3.4 – features for end users as well as administrators:

Filr users will become more productive:

  • They can now send “File Request” from the My Files area in Filr.
  • The Filr web interface now switches it’s language to the language set in the user’s browser, to make using Filr easier.
  • A Technical Preview for the Filr Desktop Client for Linux is now available for ubuntu machines.
  • An email notification will be sent when a share is first accessed, and there is a report of accesses to a shared item.
  • In iOS 11, the integrations in to the native “Files” app were improved (e.g. around SSO and NativeUI).

New controls will make life easier for Filr administrators:

  • Administrators can now set the default expiration time for new shares (until now, this was always “until the end of time”).
  • For better data protection, the admin can now chose to hide users’ LDAP IDs from other users, making social engineering attacks harder.
  • Net Folders can now be configured to be invisible to the Desktop Client, and can also be configured to be visible, but unavailable for synchronization, saving client disk space in case of user error.
  • The Outlook Plug-In was improved: it is now possible to send File Links without the need for authentication or registration. Recipients of Files do not need to register themselves as a Filr user. This was a much-requested feature by users on the Ideas portal, and once more, Micro Focus delivered.

On top of all this, the Webinar will be covering the correct steps for upgrading a Filr site to Filr 3.4 via the Online Update Channel, and for configuring the system properly.

 

Live Phishing Training in Kiel – Other Municipalities are Following Suit

On the topic of Cyber Attacks, the State capital Kiel has been once bitten, and now is twice shy – since the City was affected by a phishing attack and “smuggled” Trojan software some time ago. With a Live Phishing Training, the city council conducted a campaign for raising awareness and for training their employees. More than 3000 employees have been trained, and the outstanding success of the campaign has led to a large echo in media all over the country, lending to it achieving “Lighthouse” status: it not only has resulted in a higher level of problem awareness with the employees, but also with other municipalities.

To recap – the phenomenon: through using fake websites, fake e-mails of fake text messages, attackers gain login details that allow the culprit to access networks and access privileged data – more than 90 percent of cyber attacks start with one of the notorious “phishing mail”.

Phishing-Mails come in various forms and flavors, and follow various patterns, for example the “payroll scam” pattern (28%), the “voucher with attached PDF” pattern (14%) or the “CEO scam” pattern (24%). To successfully attack a user, their attention is taken by supposedly important things. An email from payroll usually means it’s about their salary, a voucher makes them curious for the option to get “free stuff”, and if the CEO sends a direct email, it must by definition be an important and urgent issue, leading the user to divulge privileged data to make sure they get paid, to make a bargain, or to be seen as an efficient and worthy employee.

The core of the issue here is: the best technology will not help the situation, if the employees have not been made aware for the specific threat at hand – the motto has to be: raise awareness for the problem, and provide concrete advice on how to distinguish he bad emails from the good ones.

Citizens have a right to data security in public administration

In Kiel, three quarters of the employees were able to tell that a phishing e-mail sent to them was a fake. But unfortunately, only one single incautious employee is enough to let malicious software get into the network and spread there. Understandably, some of the “phished” people felt they had been blindsided and were not at all happy about it. But: security comes first, citizens have a right to protection of their data, and real phishing emails do not come with an advance warning!

For more information: here on our website, you will find the section Information Security and Data Protection, where there is more to be found on awareness raising for employees in the field and also the press review on the Live Phishing Training at Kiel.

 

Rationalization, Digital Transformation: Vibe and Filr provide a competitive advantage

On July 10th, 2018, two webcasts took place, which demonstrated the rationalization potential of Micro Focus Vibe and Filr. Rationalization is one of the decisive driving factors for organizations undergoing digital transformation.

Today, document management and enterprise content management entail a lot more than just search and retrieval of information items with audit-safe archival. Tailored solutions accelerate processes and support collaboration in organizations of any size as well as the collaboration with external experts.
Organizations are more and more in need of digital transformation to fuel their knowledge production, knowledge retainment and knowledge organization. A necessity for this is agile, quick and intelligent management of content, of access control and of information structure, as well as cooperation, collaboration and organization-internal communication.

The combination of Vibe and Filr delivers a wide range of essential functionality. Filr allows for secure file synchronization, sharing and very basic collaboration, while Vibe brings the full range of collaboration features with an even stronger focus on security, in some respects even down to field level. It provides workflow capabilities as well as strong auditing, and it can be used for full effect in many scenarios, e.g. as an intranet or DMS system. The two products are not only designed to run securely on premise, but function as well when hosted by a trusted partner or in a private cloud. They integrate well with more communication tools like Micro Focus GroupWise, Micro Focus Messenger, but also Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office. Their search capabilities are outstanding, and they can provide benefit right from day one.

Ask us what Vibe and Filr can do for your productivity and efficiency!

Two Fixes in Vibe 4.0.4 FTF1 for issues in Authentication and Registration

An FTF (a “Field Test File”, think “Hot Patch”) for Vibe has been released by Micro Focus. It addresses the following issues.

Issue 1: Some Active Directory users are unable to login to Vibe when a password expiration policy is enforced.

If your Vibe site authenticates users against a Microsoft Active Directory, and you have a domain-wide password expiry policy set as well as a local, GPO-based policy, then you might be affected by this issue. If the password expiry on the domain level is shorter, or stricter, than the one set on the GPO level, then the stricter of the policies will be in effect, effectively disabling Vibe login for a user as soon as the shorter expiry time is reached. This is due to the special way in which AD calculates password expiry. We have joined Micro Focus in analyzing this issue together with an affected customer, and Micro Focus has implemented a solution that not only fixes the current issue, but also enables protection against similar issues in the future.

If you suffer this issue, just open a Service Request with Micro Focus, referencing TID 7023145.

Issue 2: External users unable to complete registration in Vibe

If you use the sharing functionality and have external users register themselves after being invited, you might run into this issue. When a file is shared with an external user and they try to register using the link included in the invitation email, the normal registration screen shows. After filling out their information and clicking on” Register”, though, an error is displayed, giving the message “An error occurred in the registration process. Please try again”. If the user then tries to register again, the behavior of the UI stays the same and registration is not possible. The system error log shows no messages when this happens.

This issue has also been resolved by Micro Focus Engineering and has been rolled into the FTF for Vibe 4.0.4. If you suffer from this issue, open a Service Request with Micro Focus and reference TID 7023146.

Use Case Spotlight

This time around, our Use Case Spotlight covers Micro Focus Filr, the secure and powerful platform for your File Sync & Share-needs. You can leverage Filr to use your existing infrastructure more efficiently, because Filr provides you with features that integrate with your environment. This Use Case Spotlight demonstrates how you can speed up a process and massively remove overhead on a process that collects information in the field to be used inside the organization.

The Challenge

A large number of processes has field staff taking pictures and processing them back at their desk, or sending them to a staffer in-house for processing. Examples for such processes include field staff documenting damages, civil engineers and architects documenting the progress, the building or work quality, or craftsmen and contractors documenting the before and after state on a job. Each time, images are taken and either transferred to a stationary PC upon returning from the job, sent by email, or shared through an unsecure cloud storage provider. An in-house staffer has to download the pictures, file them, and can only then use them in the process. All this needs time, and sometime it not only delays the process, but also lowers data security and protection.

The Solution

Filr to the rescue! Using Micro Focus Filr, processes like that can be accelerated and made more secure in a transparent way. On the field staff’s mobile device, the Filr app is installed and configured for “automatic upload” of images. This makes the mobile device upload every image to Filr as soon as it is taken, and if needed it also deletes the image after successful upload. In case this is not wanted, for example in case of BYOD, the user can still upload the images to Filr from the device’s image gallery. The in-house staffer at their desk in the office has the Filr Desktop Client installed on their Windows PC, Linux PC, or Mac, and has the upload folder for images configured to synchronize automatically, so they get the images downloaded to their PC immediately after the upload has finished, so they can immediately start processing the images or ask for additional material if needed while field staff is still on site, saving additional trips. If the field staff is delivering items, and signed receipts or other documents are photographed on site and uploaded, the customer can be engaged by support staff right away to positive effect, and also the billing process can be streamlined and accelerated.

The Result

Used like this, Filr has the power to really boost efficiency in distributed processes. Get up to date about the advantages of Filr as a platform for your use cases, and convince yourself of the ease and accessibility of implementing them.

Just get in touch, and we will talk about your use case – and maybe your solution will be one of our Use Case Spotlights in the future!