We're pleased to announce the release of NPM v12 Beta3!  Thanks to the all the feedback we've received from you guys, we've made a slew of adjustments to the features introduced inBeta1 and Beta2.  We're excited to see what you think of those adjustments.  In addition, I'd like to highlight the following features that are brand new, significantly enhanced, or otherwise worth a look in Beta3.

Wireless Heatmaps

Wireless heatmaps are coming along nicely!  Check out the latest rendering and a few new/reworked features.

Latest Rendering Results

Floorplan Scale

Set scale so that we know if your floor plan represents a sprawling 40,000 sqft campus or a 2000 sqft doctor's office.  Kind of important.

Virtual Site Surveys

Advanced algorithms that predict the strength of wireless coverage are super cool and all, but what happens when they don't take into account your cement walls?  Or a room full of metal file cabinets?  Traditionally the solution to this has been spending more time modeling; manually adding walls, specifying wall materials, and adding other objects in the environment that affect your wireless.  This takes a lot of time and the results are questionable.  Of course the old school solution was to walk the building with a laptop to do a wireless survey.  We've got another option though, and we call it Virtual Site Surveys.

With Virtual Site Surveys, you can use any client that is connected to your network as an instant survey point.  After telling Orion where the client is on your floor plan, Orion will query the wireless infrastructure in real time for signal strength information about that client.  Using the additional data points, Orion recalculates wireless coverage, quickly improving accuracy to account for RF obstacles or other difference between the ideal RF environment and the real world.  Incidentally, in a pinch you could repeat this process multiple times with the same wireless client (e.g. your laptop) to mimic a traditional wireless survey.  Check it out:

Real World Wireless Heatmap Feedback

We had to lock a group of very smart people in a dark room and supply a huge amount of mountain dew to get this heat map algorithm working as well as it does.  Based on internal modeling and testing in our lab, the heatmaps created by Orion should be pretty darn solid, but the real test is the real world.  As such, we're particularly interested in how the maps look in your environment including:

• Do the wireless heatmaps that we're generated meet your expectations?
• How do the signal strength results match up with the real world?  If you have a laptop at a given location on a map, how does the signal strength the laptop is reporting match up against what the map says it should be?
• If you use Virtual Site Survey, are you able to quickly improve the accuracy and work around RF obstacles to your satisfaction?

Web Based Alerting

A major piece of functionality has moved to the web AND has been extended with a truckload of new functionality that a lot of you have been asking for.  We've continued to make additional enhancements in Beta 3.  Play with the new condition builder and tell us what you think!

Note: although Beta3 supports building new rules on the web from scratch, the rules do not fire.  Is that important for you?  Kidding! Alert firing is coming, but for now focus on the building process.

WIRELESS VENDOR SUPPORT

New to NPM v11 is support support for Aerohive, Aruba Instant AP, and Juniper/Trapeze. Check out the Manage Pollers page to apply them.  We're still looking for feedback on how this is working in more real world environments.

Conclusion

Interested in taking a closer look? Sign up for NPM v12 beta here: NPM 12 Beta Survey

As a reminder, beta software is for testing only and should not be used in a production environment.