As you have probably noticed, ORF 5 gets a pretty intensive facelift along with the numerous usability improvements. This design philosophy will also be visible on the ORF website. Let’s look at one of these in detail.

Knowledge Base

Experienced ORF users will be familiar with the FAQ found on our website. As the name suggests, we tried to collect and categorize frequent problems that ORF users faced and gave suggestions on how to work the problem.

In ORF 5, FAQ will be replaced by a Knowledge Base section that will provide a more user friendly and intuitive interface to find the required content. The KB will be a searchable source of information on all of the topics covered by the FAQ as well as brand new articles. As you can see in the first screenshot, navigating through the knowledge base will be based around the search function.

The search box will have all the functions of advanced search including partial matches and wildcards. Within the results of the search, the keywords will be highlighted to show the context of the words. Clicking on a topic title will take you to the full article. Navigating back to the search results will take you back to the search result list with the keywords still highlighted. This will allow you to look through the search results without having to repeat the search.

Ratings and Comments

One of the coolest features of the new KB is the ability for you to rate each article in the Knowledge Base on the basis of relevance and conciseness.

Giving a rating of 4 stars or less (5 is the maximum), you will be able to write a short comment on the article to give us feedback on how we could improve the text. The whole process takes a few seconds while it provides us with excellent information on how we can tailor the article to your needs.

The Knowledge Base function is only one of many interactive features in the new ORF website that will help with the communication between our users (you) and us. We will be showcasing more of these in future blog articles so stay tuned.

The next cool feature of ORF 5 we are about to show falls into the category where the new version offers the most: overall experience improvements.

The Log Event View already exists in previous versions – this is the dialog you get when you double-click an event in the Log Viewer. In ORF 5, it underwent an major renovation:

I guess it is a fine example of how a picture is worth a thousand words. Now let’s see what’s new in there besides the aesthetic improvements.

1) Grouping and Highlighting: Every logged event has 16 fields. Each one carries useful information, but you rarely need all of them, so we grouped the fields and hid many lesser used fields to reduce the information load. The Email Subject and the Event Message columns are now highlighted.

2) Event Summary: Each event gets a one-sentence automatically generated summary. This will primarily benefit those new to ORF, but could provide everyone a quick overview of the event and its significance.

3) Remote Control Integration: Now you can send IP and email addresses to the ORF configuration from this dialog.

4) Integrated Log Knowledge Base: This is the coolest new stuff in here. No idea what a log message means? What are its implications? What action to take? Click the Explain button to look the event up online and get a knowledge base article specifically crafted for the logged event.

We expect this to become a major self-help option, because in a huge number of technical support cases the administrator finds the log message, but not sure what to do with it. Say, you run into a DNS timeout or SERVFAIL warning event. Many questions arise: how do I fix this? Does it has to be fixed at all? Does this mean the Vogon fleet is about to blow up Earth? Or is it the Klingons? Goa’ulds? Is the l33t Jeff Goldblum really our only hope? These are particularly complex questions that a short log message cannot volunteer to explain, but using this feature we will deliver the latest information right there where you need it.

Stay with us, next week we will look into another new feature.

We are updating the Out-Of-Office email subject samples for ORF 5 and collected more samples from more languages.

If you speak any of the languages displayed below and you can verify the credibility of the samples, it would be appreciated if you can comment on this blog entry. Also, if you have anything to add, please let us know.

Croatian: Odsutan:
Czech: Mimo kancelář
Danish: Automatisk svar ved fravær
Danish/Norwegian (alternative version): Ikke til stede
Dutch: Niet aanwezig:
English (alternative version #1): Automatic reply from:
English (alternative version #2): Out of office
Finnish: Olen lomalla
French (alternative version): Absence du bureau
German (alternative version): Abwesend:
Italian: Risposta automatica Fuori sede
Latvian: Ārpus biroja
Icelandic: Fjarverandi:
Polish (alternative version): Poza biurem
Portuguese (alternative version): Ausência Temporária
Slovenian: Odsoten:
Spanish: Fuera de la oficina
Swedish: Frånvaro, autosvar

Configuration Synchronization is an enterprise service in ORF 5 which helps organizations to reduce the administrative overhead of maintaining multiple ORF servers. This feature allows appointing a central settings repository server (“Publisher”) and takes care of distributing the setting changes to the rest of the servers (“Subscribers”).

The audience of this feature are organizations who maintain multiple ORF installations, e.g.

• Companies with two or more ORF servers on their network (e.g. one on the primary MX, another on the secondary MX)
• IT shops who manage the ORF installations of their clients centrally.

Back to the technical details, subscriber servers periodically check the publisher server for configuration changes. When a change is encountered, subscribers download the publisher configuration and reinitialize with the latest settings.

The entire process utilizes the same communication foundation as introduced in our previous Remote Access article. Thanks to this, administrators can grant Config Sync-only access to the subscriber clients.

In addition to the full configuration synchronization, ORF 5 also allows overriding certain settings from the publisher. This is called “localization” in ORF – when you “localize” something, the local settings of the subscriber will take effect, overriding the publisher settings.

ORF 5 has two localization scopes: Path Localization and Feature Localization.

Path Localizations are for overriding file system path settings, e.g. the path to the log files. This comes handy if the publisher and the subscriber servers are almost identical, having same role and location within the network, but the file system paths are different.

Feature Localizations allow overriding entire features, like the Intermediate Host List or the Sender Whitelist (a “feature” is something that has its own page in the ORF Administration Tool). This allows a versatile range of localizations, e.g. a different Intermediate Host List for a different location within the network.

As for fault tolerance questions, subscribers can operate with the last known configuration indefinitely if the publisher is not available for any reason (at least one successful initial sync is required, though).

Screenshots (some of the UI is subject to change):

Questions? Comments? Let us know.