What to expect from JumpCloud in Q1 2024

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This is an edited transcript of the 02.02.24 IT Hour

Overview

• Chase Doelling, Principal Strategist at JumpCloud does a recap of the Q1 2024 Product Roadmap, highlighting the main pillars and focus areas of feature development in the upcoming quarter. Watch the full webinar here.  
• Tom Bridge, Director of Product Management, adds to Chase’s summary with additional details and answers questions from the audience. 
• Becky Scott, Head of Community, and Tom Bridge discuss the value of Feature Requests from customers and also ideate on the best way to source them from the Community. 
• Read the show notes here

Transcript

Chase: For those that either haven’t attended the Roadmap Webinar before or you want to watch the full version, I encourage you to do that. This is my director’s cut going through features, use cases and also how we’re setting up for 2024. Quick disclaimer, since these are roadmap items, keep in mind that we do our best to stay within these dates but things change.

2023 Recap

I want to take 30 seconds to cover some of the bigger highlights that we had come out across the platform. We found out we released over 126 customer facing features. Some big, some small, but that’s a lot across the entire platform. Some of the big ones I wanted to highlight were: 

1. Passwordless with JumpCloud Go 
2. More HRIS Integrations 
3. Flexibility with Windows MDM
4. Centralized OS with Android EMM
5. Remote Assist & Background Tools 
6. Automation with Dynamic Groups 

2024 Roadmap

As of this morning we had over 200 feature requests that have come in since the beginning of the year. If you have ideas please add them into the Admin Console. We see all of them. This is my live feed that I watch through slack and it’s great to see different people chime in. A lot of our roadmap and our vision is guided by this so please keep that up. 

Key Focus Themes: 

1. Deeper Device Management Capabilities 
2. More Insights, Events, and Reporting 
3. Expanding APIs and Headless Operations

Id’ say there’s a lot of depth that you’ll experience from the JumpCloud platform this year. We’re really diving deeper into devices, adding more insights and operations and other ways you can operate the platform at scale. 

Q1 2024

Identity 

1. Active Directory Delegation - Making the migration process easier, especially for MSP taking on new clients or Merger & Acquisitions scenarios. 
2. Dynamic Groups Operators - Providing additional granularity and flexibility across resources
3. Google Workspace User Scheduled Updates - Tightening integration with additional automations including scheduled user updates. 
4. External Identity Federation - Making sure the JumpCloud Identity is as flexible as possible

Access 

1. JumpCloud Go - Expanding JumpCloud Go capabilities with Step Up Conditional Access, Linux support, additional browser support
2. On Demand Push from JumpCloud Protect - API first feature to trigger additional/step up user verification
3. Temporary Elevated Access - A long requested feature that will come with access lifecycle logging for when access is granted, who granted it, what they did during, when it was revoked etc. 
4. JumpCloud Password Manager - Additional Directory Insights for Password Manager events  
5. Billing Only Admin Role - Minimizing scope of access and permissions of non technical team members who need access to billing information. 

Devices

1. Windows Lite Provisioning - Faster provisioning via USB and Golden Image
2. Software Management - Private Repo becomes Generally Available, updates for Windows and Mac Stores, and MTP Support 
3. Android - Enterprise readiness for Android with additional policies and identity management on Android devices
4. iOS - VPP for BYO Devices

Tom: There’s a lot to be excited about right now, lots of really cool stuff for Q1 and I can’t wait for us to do this again in three months and start talking about what’s in Q2. The first half of this year has an immense amount of value for everybody in terms of management features that folks have been longing for. 

As we look at Application Management, we’re really excited to get the App Repo out there in everybody’s hands. Looking at the longer management story, being able to manage BYO devices is certainly key to our story here, especially as we start to head down the device trust pathway for mobile devices in the second quarter. So the pathway is really set clearly at this point. 

VPP for BYO is queued up for the end of this quarter. We’re very excited for that because now you’ll be able to do VPP enrollment with Apple IDs. I’m very interested to talk to customers who want to federate their managed Apple IDs with JumpCloud now that that feature is out of beta at Apple and available from your Apple Business Manager. So if you’re interested in that please drop me an email. 

JumpCloud Go for Edge is on the roadmap for Q1.We have a lot more browsers coming later on including Safari, Firefox, and support for Linux devices. So that if you've got Linux workstations out in the field that have TPMs that have fingerprint readers or other mechanisms there, we can support those.

Q&A

Q: Is the on-demand step-up via API something like “We make a custom script/workflow and then can prompt a specific user with a message to approve a JumpCloud Go prompt?” Like I could use this in an automation job to approve a software request?

A: That is the goal. The hope is that you’re able to trigger it via API to a specific user to get a prompt for JumpCloud Protect. That’s what we’re really excited to see. Where people will take this. 

Q: When can we get access to try the Temporary Elevated Access feature?

A: If you’re open to providing feedback and testing, please reach out to us. We’re only going to open that up to a few people while we test this out in a limited fashion. We’ll share more as time goes on. 

Q: When can we see JumpCloud Protect Push Authentication for the Admin Console?

A: It’s been a part of our focus for the first half roadmap but we’ll talk about that more in Q2. In terms of a date, I can’t give you one today. We certainly see this as an incredibly opportunity to make JumpCloud’s most secure Identity be powered by JumpCloud’s most secure authentication mechanism. We see the clear parallel and we have a solution in mind which we’ll talk about more in the future. 

Q: When can we see reports for things like “Who has less than 16GB of memory?”

A: That’s certainly something that you can do through our APIs today. You can query the System Insights APIs to get those values out of your environment. We’re happy to help you work on those scripts. But for built-in reports, we’d love to get some more feature requests around what specific issues you’re having trouble with in terms of querying information. 

Q: Is there any movement around Mobile Devices being used in conjunction with Conditional Access?

A: Yes there is but it’s not going to be in our Q1 Roadmap. But we certainly have a clear path forward and you’ll hear from Sergey Belous in Q2 about that. 

Q: How about customizing the home screen widgets to be able to display the contents of said reports?

A: Please get those feature requests in and talk about how you’d like to use those home page widgets. 

A Note on Feature Requests

Tom: Feature requests at JumpCloud are one of those things that everybody is probably a little afraid that they just just go into somebody’s trash can. Does anybody actually read those? I can promise you every PM has a channel in Slack, an email thread, a ton of automation work that goes into processing feature requests. You can ask questions through your TAM, through an Account Manager, through the Community to build use cases that Product Managers will engage with at some point. 

We’re really focused on gathering use case information so that is critical when you file a feature request. You may have a use case that’s similar to another customer’s but not the same. We want to be able to differentiate between those two because we never want to design a product for just one person. You all have unique environmental concerns and I want to make sure that we can triangulate that towards a product that works more broadly. There’s a lot of us here at JumpCloud and in the Product team who are working hard on making the product better based on all of the data that we get from you as customers, based on all the data that we contain based on your systems so please use the feature requests. 

I also really love the community forum that we have for this. It’s a great place for folks to say “Hey, look, I’ve got a clear feature request and I need help getting this through. Does your organization use that product in a similar way? Would you be willing to fill out a feature request?”. 

I know that Apple has a feedback system that’s a lot like a black hole, but it works. For two and half years I’ve been banging on the doors to allow for federating managed Apple IDs and we finally have that feature in production today. So it’s really exciting when groups of people work together to drive those things forward, building a case together. 

Community Sourced Feature Requests 

Becky: We are getting requests here on the IT Hour that the community wants more visibility into the process - being able to see what other people are putting in so they can add their two cents or vote on it. We've already had a few conversations with the Product team about this and our goal is to figure out a way to work toward that and have more of that working-out-loud on ideas or feature requests. 

We’ve also talked about putting a handful out there and letting people vote on which ones they want to see the most. Stuart's saying a top 10 most requested. We could say “Hey, here's 10 or 20 that we're considering in the next half of the year. Which one of these would work best for you or make you most excited?” and then gather feedback.

What I'm thinking of is not just the voting system, but having comments where people can say, “I would like that, but I also need this added to it” so that there is a place to give your unique spin. Kelly brings up a good point - “You don't know what other people are requesting”. They might have something and you look at it and go, “Oh yeah, absolutely. That's a great idea. I think so too!” but you may not come up with that on your own. Kelly says “A coordinated effort means you're in cahoots with other people and that can be fun, too.” Absolutely.

We have the capability to do that in the Community, but there is a process already built up for the Product Managers so we have to be sensitive to their workflow and figure out how we can mesh those together. So it's not going to be something we can do immediately, but we have talked about it. We're looking at several different ideas. Keep giving us input like this. It'll help us refine what we're going to try to do going forward. So we really do appreciate y'all saying things like this and letting us know what it is you want to see.