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Today, we’re excited to announce our new podcast: Industrial Visionaries!

MQTT is a go-to protocol for industrial IoT, known for its efficiency, scalability, and ease of use. While it offers great flexibility in handling real-time data, there are key factors to consider in order to get the most out of it. From ensuring data consistency to addressing security and performance concerns, these factors can significantly enhance MQTT’s effectiveness in industrial settings.

The focus of the FlowFuse 2.11 release has all been about providing clarity for our users and reducing friction in our user experience.

Navigation in FlowFuse has been streamlined with a new sidebar and team-wide search feature. We've provided an interactive visualization for your MQTT topic hierarchy, ensuring you have a clear view of your own MQTT/UNS architecture, and, we've re-architected the audit logging to ensure you have an easy-to-understand and searchable view of everything going on in your FlowFuse Team and it's respective Applications, Instances and Devices.

The FlowFuse Device Agent is a tool that enables you to run Node-RED on various hardware devices, such as Raspberry Pi, Windows, MacOS, and PLCs. Running Node-RED directly on the device helps when your application flow needs direct access to sensors and actuators connected to the hardware, facilitating seamless integration with the FlowFuse platform. This integration enables secure management, monitoring, and remote editing of flows from a centralized platform, even at the edge.

It has been one of the most requested features for FlowFuse Dashboard, and is now available in its first iteration. It is now possible to resize and move groups in the Dashboard itself using the new "Edit Layout" feature. That's not all though, we've added a new "Spacer" widget to assist with layouts, added improvements to the rendering of charts and plenty more.

With FlowFuse 2.10 we've added some new major features, as well as improvements across the board for FlowFuse users.

Most notably, FlowFuse now offers it's own MQTT service, with the option to create MQTT client credentials for your teams, making it even easier and quicker to build your full-stack Node-RED applications.

When it comes to securing Node-RED applications and its editor, ensuring that your flows and data are protected from unauthorized access can feel like a daunting task. Even after investing considerable time, achieving the right level of security often remains a complex challenge. For enterprises, this goes far beyond access control— security is a cornerstone of protecting sensitive data, maintaining operational continuity, and meeting strict regulatory requirements. A robust security framework not only prevents breaches but also safeguards intellectual property, preserves trust, and shields the organization from costly cyber threats.

Managing a single Node-RED instance involves setting up and configuring a server, securely tunneling for remote access to edge devices, and ensuring proper networking and firewall configurations, all of which can be complex. The complexity increases when overseeing multiple Node-RED instances spread across various projects, edge devices, or environments.

FlowFuse recently launched Software Bill of Materials (SBoM) for enterprise customers. This powerful tool enhances security and management within projects, particularly in the Node-RED ecosystem. As open-source libraries and software continue to play a pivotal role in the industry, monitoring third-party components used in projects becomes essential. The SBoM enables organizations to track dependencies and identify vulnerabilities, ensuring compliance and mitigating risks.

This update introduces new ways to enhance data visualization and customization in your dashboards. With key improvements, including a new chart type, customizable app icon support and a dialog feature for groups, this release helps tailor dashboards for better user interaction and flexibility.

Version control is essential, especially when multiple people are working on the same Node-RED project. Without it, changes can easily overlap, or worse — accidental updates could break critical flows. FlowFuse solves this challenge with snapshots, allowing you to create backups of your flows, restore previous versions, and safeguard your project from unexpected issues.

FlowFuse 2.9 bring improvements in application maintenance with the new "Software Bill of Materials" and in building full stack applications, with an iteration on the "Static Asset Service", by providing the option to "share" your assets assets publicly, making them consumable by external services and your Dashboards.

FlowFuse 2.8 sees a new major feature introduced to the platform. The first iteration of the "Static Assets Service" is now available, allowing you to host and serve static files from your FlowFuse instance, giving you easy access to file storage for your applications, and seamless integration of those assets and files within Node-RED.

At FlowFuse, we're constantly evolving to make sure your dashboard experience is seamless and efficient. This month, we're excited to introduce several new features that enhance your interaction with the platform. From organizing your data with Tabs to visualizing critical information with new Gauges, we've got you covered.

FlowFuse 2.7 has had a big focus on user experience improvements, particularly centered around teams running at large scales, with over a thousand devices and instances. With this in mind, we've introduced a new search feature that allows you to search across all of your FlowFuse instances, devices and applications from a single place, made it easier to manage your devices with bulk actions, introduced a new notifications inbox to give you a clearer picture on activity across your team, and just for good measure, we've also extended the AI-infused Node-RED experience to the JSON Editor.