R80.20 Multi-Tasking Feature

[Yair_Herling]

R80.20, our latest release, offer various improvement to both security management gateways. One of them is the ability to open several SmartConsole sessions in parallel and thus switch between tasks seamlessly.

[Norbert_Bohusch]

Why do I have to supply a session name manually, if I use this feature, although "All sessions must have description" is not active!

[Adiel_Ashrov]

Hello Norbert,

First, cheers for being an early adopter of our latest R80.20M1 release!

Second, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you our considerations in implementing Multiple Sessions with a required session name when leaving session.

Multiple-Sessions is an advanced management feature aimed for power users of SmartConsole.

A power user would likely handle multiple tasks in parallel in different contexts.

What we have seen in our private usability sessions with users, is that if the session name is not meaningful, auto-generated for example, it’s very difficult return to your desired previous session.

Imagine that you worked on tasks in the following sessions:

1. Session-1 (Access control)
2. Session-2 (IPS)
3. Session-3 ( Global policy assignment )
4. And so on…

How could you differentiate between these tasks and return to the one in top priority? And what if session name is not required at all, and can be left empty?

We decided to present a change in the behavior that can be painful at first, but will lead to a better work process in the end for Power users.

When you need to document your work before continuing to another task, it will be easier for you to return to this task based on its name.

If you work on a single task at a time you can return to Single session mode anytime, where a session name is not mandatory.

Feel free to contact me for any issue

Adiel

[Norbert_Bohusch]

I understand the need of meaningful session name if using it really in parallel for many tasks. 

But I think there are many users out there who are using a single session most of the time, but would like to have the opportunity to open a 2nd session only in the case they can’t publish their changes to do a simple short change in between.

For them this might be unpractical. Maybe you can think of a way to enforce it only starting with 2nd session.

[Adiel_Ashrov]

Hello Norbert Bohusch

Thanks for your input and time.

[Tomer_Sole]

The next release, R80.20 (no suffix...) will let users select "auto-generate session name" even in multiple session per user mode. This is currently available in the https://community.checkpoint.com/message/18347-check-point-r8020-production-and-public-ea