Explore The New Hardware View – The Boring Toolbox Release 5.24.0520

Here’s our new hardware tab. 

The idea of this is to replace what we currently have in hardware where we do all our bulk actions. We tried to make it as intuitive as possible. 

One of the things that we really like is if you look at this, we have a chip here that says one camera offline.

That chip follows you down from the hierarchical levels. 

This was the highest level when we were fold it up to the recording server, then it goes down to the hardware. And then if I expand that again, that gives me down to the uh, device or the camera level, which is really easy to kind of drill down and find those cameras that are giving you issues, which is really great.

We also call out these little chips here to see whether it’s critical, whether using HTTPs or not. 

We also provide you with the IP, so it’s giving you all the information you need right in the grid. 

Some of the best feedback we’ve been getting is about this one little tiny thing over here—this five hardware.

Just having the camera count or the hardware count next to the recording server has helped people immensely. It helps you understand how many cameras or hardware are actually added to that recording server. 

The searching and filtering is also much faster in the browser and gives you a lot more flexibility when you’re searching.

You have options like ‘device status is’, ‘is not enabled’ and ‘online’ we’re replacing, ‘not providing video’ and ‘providing video’ with ‘online’ and ‘offline’ to make it follow more industry standards. 

You can add all sorts of things in here. We can actually drill into the brand. And this list is going to be dynamically generated based on the hardware that’s actually in our system.

And then we can go down into device groups, which is something that we never had before that. This is really cool. In this case I don’t have anything, but you can see, I can pull this out and I can see all my access cameras here and unfold them.

Now this little fly out mimics our details view in The Toolbox and it gives us all the information. This is actually a downloadable remote desktop link. So you can click on this and then you open it up and boom, you have remote desktop directly from here. 

So we didn’t take away that functionality. That’s still there. That’s exciting. 

It gives you a nice clean status. 

You also have view all events here which pops up, which will show us all the events for that particular recording server. Just like all these other modals, you can download this into excel and you can search and you can actually filter, believe it or not, I don’t know that we’ve showed this before, but you can filter all sorts of things in here as well. It’s a very flexible little grid. 

And then as we scroll down, let’s go into one that’s here. 

You’ll note that we have a camera, we have all the information about it, we have controls. If those controls are available for access, Hanwha, Bosch. We have those controls that show up.

We also have our description box.

And then here is when you drill into the camera itself,  this is our dev environment so this will be out, but it’s not currently out. 

The other thing that we built in, which is actually probably the most important part of this view is to be able to do, to push out the bulk changes.

And so you’ll see that’s fully implemented here as well. 

You click on each one of those hardware or you can actually drill into the device itself. You get a number of how many have been set, selected and then you can just jump over to edit. 

You can rename devices just like we could before in a nice interface that’s a full size shows us the new name there, you can hit camera settings as well.

Pulling in all our new camera settings. 

And this actually is a brand new interface. 

It streamlines the process actually quite a bit because you don’t have to jump from, from tab to tab. 

It’s all done here. I believe it’s much more intuitive and we’ll find out what people think.

You can see that, you actually see the old value and the new value as opposed to just um, the new value. And we can do that with resolutions and everything. So very cool. 

A new interface for camera settings but we also get status here on off for different things.

And then also we can do the bulk reboot and autofocus directly from here. 

I think we redid this like three or four times to really kind of get the feel for it and to make it very intuitive, easy to use because there’s a lot of data here, a lot of functionality.

This new update was released on Tuesday, which is really exciting. 

The only part of this that is not released yet is the little image in the details view. 

To access this new hardware view you just need to install the latest version of Boring Toolbox and then launch into the web browser which is going to be the ip of the management server.

The Boring Toolbox and you can log in with your Milestone credentials, or you can log into The Boring Toolbox thick client, and from there, there’s a button that says connect to web, and it’ll log you in without typing in your credentials.