In launching GoAnywhere MFT, Linoma is making a big product positioning change for the GoAnywhere lineup. GoAnywhere MFT combines two of Linoma’s previous MFT products, GoAnywhere Services (GAS) and GoAnywhere Director (GAD).

GAS was aimed primarily at organizations that transferred lots of files with external customers and business partners over the Web, whereas GAD was designed primarily for larger organizations with big internal MFT needs and supported features like PGP and AES encryption, file conversion capabilities, and direct database connections. The third product, GoAnywhere Gateway (GAG), remains unchanged–apart from the new features introduced with 5.0.

The changes should simplify how Linoma develops GoAnywhere, and will make it easier for customers who used features of both products, a Linoma spokesperson said. In addition to combining previously separate solutions, the company delivered new functionality that should make MFT activities both more secure and easier to use.

Users will appreciate the new HTML5-based user interface, which is “a very nice interface,” Linoma CEO Bob Luebbe said in a recent Webinar. “You’ll be able to create workflows and any kind of transfers you want to automate through drag and drop,” he said. “It makes it easy to set up multi-step workflows.”

Users can customize their GoAnywhere MFT interfaces by including any of 23 different interface gadgets that ship with the product. “So each user or administrator can have their own custom dashboard and choose which statistics and analytical information they’d like to have,” Luebbe said. “And they can build their own dashboard to share those with other users in the organization.”

GoAnywhere MFT is the recipient of numerous security and compliance-related enhancements over the previous products, including file-level logging, global search, and antivirus integration.

“We added file-level logging to make it really easy to find out every point where a file is touched through a workflow,” Luebbe said. “If you’re renaming it, deleting it, uploading it, downloading it–all those events are stored in a database we can quickly search now right through interface.”

Administrators can pull up very fine-grained details about user activity with the new release. “We have a global log search, which searches across all of our logs using Google-like terms,” Luebbe said. “For instance, maybe you want to find out all points where a precariat user was working in the system.

You can put in their user ID and a date range, and it’ll show every workflow they ran, every file transfer they pardoned.” Administrators can also get more specific by searching across specific folders or file names.

The addition of support for the Internet Content Adaptation Protocol (ICAP) standard should reduce the risk of GoAnywhere customers unknowingly consuming or distributing malware attached to files. “We added support for ICAP, which lets you tie GoAnywhere to an existing DLP [data loss prevention] or antivirus solution so it can actually check files now before they leave the organization,” Luebbe said. “It can also check files that have been received into your organization and then you can decide if you’d like to quarantine those files or notify administrators.”

Administrators and users will also appreciate the new reporting features in version 5.0, which make the creation of PDF-based reports on MFT activity easier. The reports can be scheduled to run at a set day or time, and the software even distributes the reports via email.

Linoma has included a number of pre-built reporting templates, including some that are required to adhere to PCI-DSS regulations. Lastly, the new job management capabilities will help administrators keep on top of difficult jobs. “You can now remediate jobs,” Luebbe said. “If there’s a failure with the transfer you can mark it as remediated and you can put a note on that job so you know exactly what took place to fix that problem.”

Licensing for GoAnywhere MFT (GAMFT) has been revamped compared to the previous solutions, and now Linoma says it’s including a completely free FTP server with the software. GAD and GAS customers can still license features separately, a Linoma spokesman said. For example, if a customer just owned GAD, he could just license the workflows (projects) feature in GAMFT.
And if a customer just owned the SFTP server in GAS, then he could just license the SFTP server in GAMFT. Every license of GoAnywhere MFT also includes 10 free user accounts for GoDrive, the on-premise enterprise file synchronization and sharing solution that it launched earlier this year (see story link below).

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