28.3 Managing Product Improvement

Path to Configuration Dialog: Filr Administration Console > Management > Product Improvement

The first time you log in to Filr, after changing the admin user’s password, a dialog displays that explains that the purpose of the Filr data collection system is to help improve the Filr product.

IMPORTANT:Novell collects nothing that identifies your organization, your data, or your users.

28.3.1 Accessing the Product Improvement Dialog

You can see what is collected, and you can modify, disable, or re-enable the data collection system by using the Product Improvement dialog.

  1. Open the Filr Administration Console as the Admin user.

  2. Click Product Improvement.

The data collection process runs for the first time when a Filr appliance has been running for 24 hours. Thereafter, it runs weekly.

After the initial run, a View the information collected link displays in the dialog that lets you download the .json file created by the collection process.

To see the information collected, open the downloaded file in an application such as WordPad.

28.3.2 About the Data That Is Collected for Product Improvement

As already mentioned, Novell collects nothing that identifies your organization, your data, or your users.

The items in the .json file are mostly self-explanatory, but the following points might be helpful to understanding file content.

The data is divided in three sections:

  • Installation Identifier: This is a unique string generated for each appliance. Its sole purpose is to let Novell track usage and statistics for a specific appliance over time.

  • Tier 1: This section includes the product, version and build, license type, and number of users.

  • Tier 2: This section includes additional information about the installation, most of which is self-explanatory.

    • The user information doesn’t include the LDAP user count because that is already available under the Tier1.

    • The user count numbers do not include system user accounts, such as admin, _filesyncagent, and so on.

    • The group count numbers do not include system groups, such as allusers, allextusers, and so on.

    • workspaceCount does not include system workspaces, such as the /Home workspace and so on.

    • The numbers in fileCounts and folderCounts in the netFolder section correspond to each other by position.

    • The mobile device type is derived from the value of the description field associated with the device information captured in the system. Any descriptions that don’t match one of the pre-defined keywords are included as other.

28.3.3 How Novell Receives Product Improvement Data

After the weekly data collection process concludes, the system creates a .json data file and sends it to ftp://productfeedback.novell.com/stats/filr.

If the FTP transfer is unsuccessful, the system attempts to send it again during the next weekly cycle. No send attempts are made outside of the weekly cycles.

Data files are sent through a regular non-secure FTP connection. File contents are not encrypted because no sensitive or identifying information is included.