 Unify, 5.10.12 is out, and of course the most exciting thing about the .10 is Dark Mode. And that's definitely something I'm really excited about, like I said, it's pretty cool. We get all these security patches and updates and performance enhancements, but visual enhancements, there's where it's at. Alright, so obviously I'm excited about the Dark Mode. I really did like when it came out with the new controller and the new interface, but I was not thrilled with the color scheme with it. I'm much more fan of the darker, more contrasty mode. It just looks better. Anyways, also something new in the 5.10 is when you update, you get the new welcome screen. So if you haven't updated in your surprise going, what is this? Well, it's actually kind of neat. I like that they did this so you can right away jump into the what's new. And of course, the first thing I did, this is what the Dark Mode looks like is, when you click here to the three dots, there's the old schema, there's beautiful. There's ugly, there's beautiful. So jump back into what's new. So besides the one thing I'm really excited about, a Wi-Fi experience score. Keep your clients satisfied. This is kind of neat. It's telling you when clients are not connected as well to it. And this is sometimes a trigger for when you need to add another Wi-Fi to your network. So if you see a lot of clients in a particular area and they're constantly having a poor Wi-Fi experience score, basically, it's letting them, letting you know that those clients don't connect quite as well as they should. So that's probably your cue to say, hey, I should put another device closer to the area that the clients are. So it's kind of neat that they put that. They put it right on the front page of the dashboard. And the same thing we throw in with all the updates, security, stability, and performance. It's kind of like a buzzword, but you know, it is nice. They have some more features that they added. We're going to cover in a second like that. Wi-Fi score and auto enhancement option we'll show you in a second. But yeah, that's just kind of expected. Dark mode, of course, what I'm most excited about because visually I do look at this a lot. You know, when you're working on stuff and being able to see things in better contrast makes me happy. And I like that they chose green and black. That just, you know, even my terminal has the same color scheme. Auto optimize enhance your network. I do like this feature. So the enhancement is it's got some tuning features. Now these tuning features can be applied manually. Still, it's just an option to auto optimize. And if you've ever done a larger deployment, there's things like turning off multicast broadcasts. So you don't get kind of like a lot of chatter and noise on the network. Those features are now one click away instead of having to go and set them on the switches. So I think that's really nice that they did that. Visual enhancements. We'll cover this too as it seems like there's a lot of visual things on there. Now the first thing I'll note is you do need to upgrade things. And that was right here. A minimum requirement and I'll show you what happens when you don't required firmware for access points to be 4.09 minimum and USG 4.434. Now I'll switch to a client site that hasn't been updated yet. And what happens is you can't view any stats about this. But what you can do is go in here and push upgrade. And I did that to this one already as an example. It'll upgrade it and everything comes back. So it's just a side note. It'll say unsupported because these are under 3.9 until they get on the 4.0.9 or higher firmware. You're going to get this little it's connected but an update required for it to work. So just side note of that and we're pushing upgrades to this client because we only recently loaded this weekend. We had to wait for some downtime to reboot all these switches with new firmware. So back over here to the dashboard. It says everything is good. Here's your my Wi-Fi experience is 80. Why is it 80? Well it kind of bounces back and forth and we have a couple devices that aren't connected. They're in the corners of our office. Whatever reason the Amazon dot it seems to be bringing it down. Sometimes it pops up in here. We're playing with it. We also were doing some Wi-Fi testing with here. The Wi-Fi experience score is kind of novel to me but it's not amazing. You generally still have to go in look at each client try to figure out why they're having a problem or what problems they might be having. So it's kind of novel. I guess it can alert you to some of the issues. I'm more for very narrower specific statistics. So I guess it's nice because it puts on dashboard and gives you an idea. But what they did do is enhance the way this looks. So this is different than before but I really like it. There's something to be said about having the way this interface works and having good visuals on it. And it's rare you don't see this a lot in any type of commercial products. The UI always feels like a bolted-on afterthought like just enough to make it function and no more. Versus Unify takes the time to make these look a little bit nicer. Little mouse overs, little rounded edges on windows and they added this. So if we go over here the way the little rounded buttons are is really nice in this version. So that time and attention to detail is great. One of the things I do like about their UI and this has been common for a while for them and with the dark mode it enhances it more is you know I can glance at this and tell you right away what switch ports what's plugged into one. I can also say things like hey okay this was with a mouse over. All right this is the 10 gig plug-in to this or that's you know it's just easy easy to view and see without having to really stare at it. Same thing here if we pop out the Wi-Fi we show what Wi-Fi device is on there. And let's see we notice some pie connected users guess it's like I said you can go right to the Wi-Fi here and see everything in a really easy to read manner. So they've they've just enhanced this a little bit so it's pretty cool. And if you're not familiar why this is called Air Rectangle that's because this is the large base station XG idea to review on. We have one here in our office that's our beta one that we've been testing. It's a pre-production model that's what we reviewed the production model. This is a pre-production model that we've had from Unify for a while. Same thing with the 10 gig it's kind of cool. They're still white to show you that they're the 10 gig ports. This one is the uplink that's only at gigabit. But once again really cool. If we go over here to statistics and we look at the switch stats in our office. They did a nice job on this the way you can switch. I like the animations and by default it grabs only the ports that are plugged in. So I can add statistics for ports that aren't plugged in but obviously those are very uninteresting. But if you want to narrow it down and look at what's going on through a single port you can easily just click these and make that happen. Now under the settings this is where they added the auto optimize. And I have it turned on automatically optimize network and Wi-Fi performance. And what this does is it connects high performance clients to 5G only for all Wi-Fi networks blocks multicast and broadcast traffic for high density Wi-Fi networks. That's a feature used to we have to do manually. You have to go in and set the settings on there. They're doing it now through one click. Now if you have a large deployment and I've done these where we've had like 300 over 300 devices and switches all over the place. You know manually you define port profiles and push the port profiles but there's still things that are have to be done. Also I noticed they went with a slightly different blue or the menus over here which is pretty cool as well. I don't know it just contrasts great now. This is super easy to read and that's one of the things that makes me really happy. Now what they did do in networking that is a little different is configure IPv6 network alpha. So here is the alpha settings for it. Not even beta but it's kind of neat. I don't ask me to test it because I just don't do much with IPv6. I have no use case for it because none of my clients are currently using it. But it looks like they're jumping into the IPv6 world a little bit more with alpha. I don't recall this being here in the previous versions. So nonetheless they've added that. But overall I've been pushing upgrades and they all have gone fine. It's working great. I haven't seen anyone really have any major issues with it. So we waited you know not too long to do this review. Obviously I'll update if there's something I find that's really flawed or problematic with it. But all the updates we've pushed so far to different sites have worked well. I do welcome the enhancements. I especially of course welcome the dark mode because just well it's just as easy to read. Other than that it's you know still one of my favorite features of Unify is the way their software defined networking works. It just makes managing all of our client sites easier and it manages you know we're getting a good overall visual for what's going on. It does a great job of that. All right go ahead and go ahead download this. It's the 5.1.12 stable release. It was released on Wednesday. Today is Saturday February 9th. So go ahead and download it. Like it's been a couple days. I think it's I think it's safe you know I'm running it and I'm pushing it towards my client site. So go ahead and give it a try and let me know what you think. 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