Patrick Sauerwein | @virtual_patrick

Since February 3rd 2016, we now shipped up to 30 releases with the Matrix42 Bootimage Upgrade To EPE 4 to ensure OS installations with the latest and greatest hardware with Intel Skylake architectures. The EPE releases click like clockwork not because of challenges with the EPE, but due to the reorganisation in production to agility. We are able to ship each increment to our customers – and that’s exactly what we do from day one on. We wanted to give our customers the chance to use new features instantly and give us feedback about it. I’ve perceived the feedback from the Matrix42 Customer Day in Mainz, that this was not clear to our customers and a release each week was to much. That was the reason, why we’ve changed the release cycle in a timeframe between one to four weeks.

I’ve posted the article “Microsoft Windows 7 Challenges for Enterprises and the Hardware Dilemma with Intel” before, please have a look at it for further details and background.

Latest EPE releases

With the release today, we deliver PXE Self Provisioning in the familar way. The feature set works now a little bit different because of the boot menu on the client, so we do have one manual selection more, but the main benefit comes with existing functionality of self provisioning familiar with EPE 3. You are now able to use Self Provisioning for UEFI and BIOS devices with the EPE 4.

With the release of version 4.3.x we also support PXE secure boot for 64bit clients. This version supports virtual guests on Microsoft Hyper-V hosts Generation 2 too. We also added the latest Linux Kernel in 64bit, so kernel parameters for the Microsoft Surface 4 and Surfacebook are no longer needed. There might be more hardware models where no kernel parameters are needed like e.g. the Lenovo Carbon X1. I highly recommend testing your convertibles or tablets with the new version.

Matrix42 Hardware Profile Editor

At the Matrix42 Customer Day in Mainz, we proudly announced another tool to simplify the hardware profile and driver view with the tool [Technical Preview] Matrix42 Hardware Profile Editor. The tool is only supported now for Empirum 16.1.1 and higher, but we are working on this tool in parallel to finally release it for all Empirum version 16.x. We’d like to point out that the Matrix42 Hardware Profile Editor isn’t replacing the driver management in Empirum, but helping to simplify search and adding drivers to hardware profiles. We’ve planned to deliver a new version of the driver management in the first half of 2017. Since then we hope the Hardware Profile Editor is helping you in your daily business.

Powerpoint from the Matrix42 Customer Day 2016 in Hamburg

In case you’ve missed my session about “Best Practises for the OS Installer and EPE 4” from the UEM breackout sessions, I’d like to share it with Sliedeshare. It is in German only, apologies for the English audience.

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I hope this post was valueable for you. Please leave a comment or try to connect with me for further conversations.

Thank you very much for reading and all the best,

Patrick