A review of 2007 at OPENXTRA

Following the 2006 review I thought it’d be nice to see the highlights for 2007.

Senturion

Towards the end of 2007 Sensatronics released the Senturion rack environment monitor. This is something of a landmark release for Sensatronics, as the first rack-mounted device they’ve ever released. We expect the Senturion platform to generate plenty of interest in 2008 and beyond.

New shop

From a development point of view, a good portion of the early part of the year was dedicated to updating the e-commerce system. The new platform meant that we were able to develop the new features like guided buying very quickly. I expect to see similar progress throughout 2008.

Hotspot SDK updates

Nothing ground breaking on the Hotspot SDK front, but a series of small changes that makes the SDK more and more useful. We’ve added support for Senturion, converted the key component into a much more easily deployable form, ported to Microsoft Vista, added more samples and included PowerShell support.

We’ve also recently introduced a Vista desktop gadget too. You can now see the Sensatronics temperature monitor readings live on your Vista desktop.

OWL fibre testers

One of the nice things about 2007 has been the emergence of fibre. OWL have a great range of fibre testers from fibre specialists…fibre is what they do.

Expect more from OWL in 2008 as we flesh out our offering.

Agillent Wirescope Pro

2007 saw more from Agilent as they settle on one standard hardware testing platform with Wirescope Pro improved to support a full cat6 full autotest in under 9 seconds and CAT6a/7 test in under 15! and with full frequency sweep testing to 1Ghz. Additional features are now available using easily upgraded software only licences.

New Sensatronics sites

We’ve had the German Sensatronics site for several years. Thought that the rest of Europe deserved a similar treatment. 😉 The new sites haven’t been localised yet but Italian and French versions are in production and should be available in the new year. Further localised sites will be available a little later in the year.

Blog highlights

When I did the review of 2006 the blog was just over a month old. The blog recently celebrated its first birthday. I must confess that the blog has been a steep learning curve. One of the problems with a blog is that, whilst it might look easy from the outside, it isn’t easy to do well.

The open source posts seem to have been well received. The most trafficed post was about paper prototyping!