"We have really been cranking up the level of effort with Landscape over the past year or so," said Federico Lucifredi, Canonical's Landscape product manager. "Landscape is a very important piece of our enterprise strategy, and so Canonical's commitment has increased dramatically."

The new version of the software, Landscape 12.09, is designed to better manage systemwide software updates. It offers more compliance reporting. This version also exposes its API (application programming interface) so it can be connected with other system management tools, such as Puppet. Also, the for first time, the software allows administrators to install Ubuntu over a network, in a process called bare-metal provisioning.

Launched in 2008, Landscape is systems management software that administrators can use to centrally monitor and update a fleet of computers running either Canonical's desktop or server Linux distribution.

Landscape is typically updated around twice a year. This version, however, is the first updated in nearly a year. The new version however comes with a wealth of new features, aimed squarely at providing all the functionality typically enjoyed by Microsoft Windows management tools

To better serve enterprise compliance efforts, Landscape offers a dashboard that shows which machines in a network have been updated. This can be handy for determining how many servers comply with an organization's security guidelines around patching. Also helping on the compliance front, the software now features role-based access control (RBAC), which can be used to specify which actions each Landscape user can take, as well as which machines they are allowed to manage.