Wow — where does the time go? It seems like just yesterday we were looking back at 2017. And yet here we are, on the verge of 2019, and with an opportunity to reflect on what has been an extremely busy and eventful year here at Devolutions.
We’ll get to the month-by-month overview in a moment. First, we’d like to get all emotional (it’s the holiday season after all), and tell you all, once again, that we are SO GRATEFUL to be part of your world. Thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts for your support and loyalty. It means everything to us.
OK, now we can make some popcorn, thrown another log on the fire, grab a beer (or water, soda, Flaming Moe, or anything else you wish), and have some fun! We’ll look at January through June today, and then July through December tomorrow.
January
As part of our annual tradition, we kicked off 2018 with our CEO David’s Road Map. This is David’s snapshot of the major product developments we have planned for the year. It’s always interesting at the end of the year to look back at the Road Map and compare the plan with what actually happened. We’re happy to note that we crossed every item off the list and were even ahead of schedule on a few things.
Also in January, our Product Marketing Specialist Jenny shared a behind-the-scenes look at planning the first ever Devolutions Central event. She did an amazing job and set a really high standard for all future events! We also published an important blog on how users can protect their data at home.
February
February is the shortest month in the year, but we managed to get a lot of important stuff done in just 28 days. Some of the major highlights include: integrating Google Drive into Remote Desktop Manager, establishing for the first time Devolutions Password Server as a standalone password management alternative to Remote Desktop Manager, and highlighting 10 password policies and best practices for System Administrators.
March
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was warned to “beware the Ides of March”. But we didn’t have anything to worry about, because March was a great month here at Devolutions — largely thanks to Wayk Now. First, we temporarily replaced our regular poll question with a fun Wayk Now contest, and then thanks to feedback from our beta testers we launched the official version of Wayk Now 2.0. Before wrapping up March, we also published an article in partnership with TechTarget on why your business needs a secure digital vault.
April
We started April (actually, we posted it in late March but that’s OK) by sharing some epic prank ideas for April Fool’s Day. For those of you who carried out your pranking mission, we salute you. For those victimized by the attacks, we hope you’re plotting your revenge — because the next April Fool’s Day isn’t far away!
But wait, there’s more!
In April, we announced that Wayk Now would be FREE for commercial use, and we also introduced Wayk Den, our cloud service for Wayk Now that supports peer-to-peer connectivity over the Internet, which enables you to access a remote computer outside of your network.And before we said goodbye to April,we re-named our blog “In the Trenches” to better capture the fact that we don’t view our customers from some farawayboardroom on the top floor of a skyscraper: we’re IT pros too, and deeply and personally understand the problems, risks, threats and opportunities that you face on a day-to-day basis.
May
Ah, May. If you live in our part of the world, May is typically when we finally accept that winter is over (you can’t be too sure in April, because all of a sudden it can start snowing again!). To celebrate the season, we did some spring cleaning on Remote Desktop Manager’s UI. We also released Devolutions Web Login 6, which featured several improvements.
June
June was another interesting and productive month. Our Product Marketing Specialist Jenny compared Wayk Now with two leading remote desktop access tools: TeamViewer and LogMeIn. If you haven’t looked at the feature-by-feature comparison yet, I highly recommend checking it out.
Also in June, Patrick put his unique spin on motivational wall posters with the instant classic Sysadminotaur #72 – “Demotivator” (don’t you just love the fact that one of the co-workers clinging to poor Maurice is texting on his phone?).
And to wrap up the month, our Marketing Coordinator Joey explored a question that is on a lot of people’s minds these days: is Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager outdated? (By the way: based on the comments we received, the overwhelming answer is YES IT IS!)
We’re Half Way There
We hope you’ve enjoyed part 1 of our look back at 2018. We also hope that you still have some popcorn, logs and beer around the house, because we’ll be sharing part 2 tomorrow. Stay tuned and stay warm!