Control Compliance Suite

Hi All,

Just installed CCS 11.5 in my environment in hopes to move away from our current running version of CCS 10.5. I am having many little issues, primarily duplicating our current Queries. It seems that CCS 11.5 is missing some basic, yet critical things.

We have been using and running a windows query since Bindview RMS 8.0, this query is running/collecting AD group scope information. Basically collecting information on All AD groups, Members, Description, Managed by, basic security info on AD groups. One problem I’m having is setting the following selected fields in the 11.5 group query.

(Date Attribute whenChanged and Date Attribute whenCreated) These vital fields seem to be basic attributes that any powershell script can pick up. Have these been removed in CCS 11.5 and why? OR Did I miss something? I have been scratching my head for a week now, can’t figure this out.

The other issue I have with our basic AD security queries in 11.5, I can’t seems to create a task list with Baselines and set those up to export to Character-separated values to a disk file (.chr file) I can only do CSV exports at best. Anyone know a way to find this Character-separated values export format  that was originally added back in the RMS 8.60 days?

I have a feeling Symantec missed many vital features in this revamped CCS release. Not sure if this program will work for our needs anymore if this indeed is the case.

FYI .. I noticed that there is a ticket open to add the Date Attribute data, but that was 2 years ago! So does this mean Symantec does not care about what the customers want anymore? It is taking them two + years to bring back what was once available in their product? To me that is shady CCS is slow, takes three-four times longer to run the same queries as 10.5 had... that's another issue. I need help understanding this new system.  

Give me a break! We spend a lot of money on this company.. what’s the problem!?!>

Hi - Sincere apologies for this late reply and as well for not having prioritized on your ticket earlier. If I am not mistaken, I believe we may have gotten on a call earlier where we discussed this as well. Regardless, let me explain. When we moved from CCS 10.5 to CCS 11.0, it was a major architectural change which combined the key elements of two of our products into one - the RMS/BVIS product and the Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) product. In the process we had to prioritize in terms of what we would carry forward right away vesus what we would have to incorporate progressively over time. There was a plan to address the gaps in a prioritized manner. But along with that the Product had to evolve to meet newer requirements, use-cases and integrations built around it. It may seem that it has taken longer than what we expected to have gotten around to fillings those gaps. We acknowledge the delay and regret the inconvenience. The feature that you described about DateCreated and Datemodified attributes for AD Group and AD users are currently unavailable in CCS 11.x. They existed in CCS 10.5/RMS and were not carried forward and hence the gap. Having said that, we have already planned this into our next major release CCS 12.0 which will come out mid 2017. We will also look at figuring out how to re-enable support for choosing your own delimiter for the export format. With regards to your comment about CCS queries running slower, it would help if you can either create a Support case for us to look at and fix ASAP. You also called out for help in understanding this new system. I would be glad to help you with that if you can simply shoot me an email so we can take it offline. Or if you want that discussed in this forum as well, we could do so. One way or the other, we want to help you resume your effective utilization of CCS in meeting your use-cases as it was with RMS. Thanks. 

I agree with 3L3M3NT, as as I and others have mentioned in past posts, there are many features very useful from the CCS 10 and from the RMS side that I also miss - not to mention the inability for migrating old RMS queries into CCS 11 queries.  This requires a complete rewrite of the queries in 11.x from scratch.  

Another feature I continue to miss from RMS queries and has still not yet been added back into 11 is being able to query the extended Active Directory attributes.  RMS 10.5 was able to include a Custom AD attribute in which we could collect valuable data on our AD users from within the custom AD fields (such as attributes defined for 'unix-enabled' AD users and groups - which our company integrates Dell/Quest/QAS attributes for identify UID, GID, etc. for a user.  

Another valuable feature lost from R&A 10 to 11 is Entitlements.  We we were  forced from SecurityExpressions into the CCS product line, Entitlements and the built-in Review Cycles and approvals workflows were some of the huge selling points to our management to allow us to increase our investment to grow CCS usage even furher.  From a compliance reporting stand point, I have never understood why Symantec stopped supporting Entitlements.  

Let's just hope the continued development of CCS into v12 will bring good things to existing customers - and new customers as well, of course.