It has been an impressive year. It is wonderful to reflect back on the things we have achieved, even while our ambitions were higher :-).
Support
Maybe one of the most impressive accomplishments is in the support. anDREa decided to go with their own ticket and knowledge base system. The local Support Teams looked into several possibilities and came to the conclusion that ZoHo Desk was the most suitable.
You probably have seen this via support.mydre.org. In a year's time we went from zero to over 3,000 submitted tickets. Quite a number fall in the category: create new user, create workspace, delete vm (that one is no longer needed fortunately). The knowledge base has grown substantially. With joining of anDREa's own Support Team member, sitting between the local Support Teams and anDREa trouble shooters/developers. Also very pleased that a number of local Support Teams help each other out even while the belong to different UMCs.
Development
As anDREa B.V. grows we will size up the development team as to deploy new and improved functionalities more quicker. That said, a lot has been accomplished this year.
Some of the more for users visible features are: spot vms, delete vms, announcements, self-service create VM images for your own Workspace (which can be made visible in the gallery by submitting a ticket).
Under the hood a lot has happened and is happening. Implementing MSAL to ensure myDRE.org stays safe. Role separation as a prerequisite of more granular roles. Implementing new frameworks to speed up the development and getting a more consistent UI/UX experience. Improving the loading times of Workspaces, VMs, Data Requests (yes the loading times were quite annoying at some time in the past).
Unfortunately we were not able to deliver URL-whitelisting and RDP-over-HTTPS this year.
URL-whitelisting 2022-Q1
Though we are well on our way, those are not easy feaures. URL-whitelisting how easy it may sound, there is no scalable and affordable out-of-the-box solution available in the market. Solutions that exist require downtime of 15-20 minutes per (group of) change. With approximately 1500 privileged members (and counting) you can imagine that this will not lead to a pleasant experience. Before accepting that there is no out-of-the-box solution available, finding a scalable and affordable solution, building it, testing for the devil in the details, quite a bit of time passed. Fingers crossed, but it is looking good for a Support Team driven URL-whitelisting in 2022-Q1. Next step will be making it self-servicable for privileged members.
By the way, if you're interested, the core of the solution is using three servers; one for updating, one for to be updated, one with 'old' setting as fall back. In this case it might take 15-30 minutes before the URL-whitelisting is effective (something we try to optimize, but most of it is out-of-our-hands), but users will not experience unavailability of already whitelisted URLs.
RDP-over-HTTPS 2022-H1
This is working on your VMs, be it windows or linux based, directly from your browser. Ideal, no longer RDP-files to be downloaded and ran. The most obvious solution is Microsoft's Bastion, but alas for the scale and user friendliness that is needed, it is not mature enough. So we've been working on an alternative and this turned out to be quite a massive undertaking. It does look good though for 2022-H1.