We’re excited to announce the release of Deep Freeze Mac 5.1 just in time for North America’s largest education tradeshow – ISTE. Available on June 25, 2012.
As always, we asked our users how we could improve our Mac offering. Some of the results were surprising. We learned that 82% of our customers were using Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) in their environment, but only 50% were using Deep Freeze Tasks for ARD! Some didn’t know we offered that functionality or they found the script-based interface hard to use. We also learned that customers found the Deep Freeze Assistant confusing.
So we formed a Usability Committee to join our Beta Program to test these improvements:
- Deep Freeze Remote – a new user-friendly console that manages and deploys Deep Freeze Mac via ARD. Now you can Freeze, Thaw, restart, shutdown, wakeup and update the Maintenance Schedule from this handy application.
- Unified Installer – we completely revised the new installer to be straightforward and intuitive. The new installer will allow you to: install locally, create a custom installer, or install Deep Freeze Tools such as Deep Freeze Remote or Deep Freeze Tasks for ARD.
- Snow Leopard and Lion Support all in One Installer – since 87% of users were running Snow Leopard and Lion, we integrated support for both operating systems into one installer. In other words, version 5.1 now supports both OS X 10.6 and 10.7. Version 4.66 will support OS X 10.4.11 and 10.5.
- Support for TRIM enabled SSD on Snow Leopard – full compatibility.
- HTML User Guides – Switching to HTML linked User Guides helped us to reduce the size of the installer and keep it up-to-date with ease.
We trust you’ll love the latest version of Deep Freeze Mac. If you have any feedback or would like to join our Usability Community, please contact us at deepfreezebeta@faronics.com or comment on this post! Stay tuned for Deep Freeze v7.5 for Windows later this week!
