desktop management, profile migration and cross platform...

Technical Overview

Desktop Management, Profile Migration and Cross Platform Delivery


Technical Overview

Executive Summary

This document provides a technical overview of how AppSense Environment Manager can deliver a flexible and managed user

desktop across operating platforms. We will examine the imminent Microsoft Windows 7 desktop operating system release

and how “User Environment Management” can help meet the challenges of moving to new technologies.

AppSense Environment Management provides specific features which reduce costs and simplify management. Profile

Remediation and Migration, Printer Management, application of Corporate Policy, and Reducing Logon times are all areas

where AppSense Environment Manager is proven to save time and money.

For example: AppSense Environment Manager has been shown to reduce profile related support calls by 90%, and reduce

2-4 minute logon times down to sub 15 seconds. These results have been proven at many organizations both large and

small, across multiple industry verticals and geographical locations. This document discusses these issues and shows technical

examples of how such results can be achieved.

Introduction - Migration, Migration, Migration... or Desktop Delivery “Where to from here?”Many businesses are familiar with the pains involved in managing their users day to day operations. Despite the many tools to help manage and streamline these tasks including, imaging, application deployment, and vast amounts of monitoring tools, very few of them are uniquely dedicated to managing the needs of the user environment.

AppSense Environment Manager provides a comprehensive, flexible and granular tool set for managing the “Policy” of the user infrastructure and the “Personality” of the users. This encompasses administration of printers, graphical user interface lockdowns, policy restrictions, application settings, user data directories, and profile information. AppSense Environment Manager enables flexible and controlled management of these areas independent of operating system and delivery technology by completely separating the user from the desktop device, operating system and application set.

Utilizing the power of AppSense Environment Manager, organizations seamlessly migrate users from traditional physical Windows XP platforms to any kind of desktop environment. Whether it be a simple upgrade to Windows 7 fat clients, virtual desktops or a Citrix delivered desktop. IT departments can now drive complete platform flexibility and can re-think their desktop delivery or migration strategy without having to worry about the impact on the users. Users are also able to roam between desktop delivery mechanisms and operating system versions, while AppSense Environment Manager automatically applies Policy to set up and configure the desktop, and Personalization to ensure user settings and preferences are also applied.

Why use AppSense to manage my Desktop Environment? AppSense Environment Manager has delivered flexible and robust solutions for enterprise Citrix and Terminal Server users for many years. Given such a heavy pedigree in large corporate environments, customers are now looking to AppSense to solve some of the challenges they face in their Fat Client PC or Virtual Desktop environments. These areas include; solving issues with profile corruption, giving users access to their personalized settings and user profile across all environments, complete flexibility in logon scripting, enforcing policy and lockdown on notebooks and the ability to manage advanced registry settings and implement complex script functions.

In the example scenarios below, we detail how easily it is to overcome typical desktop issues and provide insight into how the AppSense Environment Manager console works. It will be evident that managing the user environment has never been easier, especially for those not familiar with scripting languages, furthermore, also how AppSense meets the more advanced requirements for complex environments which are currently managed through complex and time consuming scripts.

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User Data, Printers and Network, Platform Management, Application Settings, User Policy and Lockdown If we look at the different components of a managed user environment, broadly speaking we separate them into two components, 1) Business Policy, or those settings I.T. departments wish to enforce onto their end users and, 2) Personalized Settings, or, those settings which are unique and controlled by the users themselves. However, identifying the individual components of a user desktop computing environment helps us achieve a more complete User Environment Management strategy to meet and deliver on the business requirements. (These are discussed further below)

1) User Data - This includes user documents. We need to decide if it is local to the machine, lives on the network, or a combination of both involving some kind offline access or synchronization strategy. AppSense provides flexibility to manage different scenarios across the enterprise.

2) Personalized Settings (Or the users application settings). AppSense can manage each application on a case by case basis and give administrators granular control over the settings and files for each application per version and per O.S. This forms part of the unique “Cross Platform” technology which enables us to enable true “On-Demand” Desktop Delivery.

3) Printers and Network - These are the cornerstone of any organizations. Traditionally delivered as network drives or mapped printers, AppSense technology can deliver them faster at logon and add flexibility and logic to help with mobile workers, slow links, remote workers or multi-site organizations.

4) Platform Management - Large corporations commonly refer to this as the Standard Operating Environment or SOE. Managing the core registry settings and files of the SOE and deploying changes can be made simpler with the core functionality of Environment Manger.

5) User Policy and Lockdown - Traditionally, organizations use Active Directory to manage security and user policy. AppSense extends implementing policy right on the local machine itself and goes further enabling lock downs of items inside GUI environment.

Example: Logon Script and Printer Management based on network subnetIn the below example you will see three green highlighted conditions. The first condition maps a drive based on User group and will be familiar to most. However, in the second condition “Client IP Address is Between” you will notice we are doing some more advanced trickery with our users including deleting existing printers from the registry and mapping two new printers based on the Subnet of the Client Device. Moreover, as our AppSense rules and logic are stored on the device in XML format, even if your device cannot talk to the domain, with AppSense you can manage what printers, drives, or files and folders, are available for that user.


Technical Overview

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Example: My Documents Consolidation Copy and Migration

In the screen shot above you will notice that if the user is in the “Migration User Group” and in the “HQ Active Directory Site” AppSense then call a RoboCopy executable action to move or synchronize the data location “Source” with the new destination called “New Destination” (Again notice the AppSense conditions in green). Moreover, the added Subnet condition can change RoboCopy to smaller packet sizes for copying across heavily utilized links.

The above demonstrates how AppSense can manage and\or migrate user My Documents from local machines to a centrally managed location. This could be combined with a My Documents folder Re-Direction on new Desktop Platforms, or simply migrated back down to new fat clients as part of a migration strategy leveraging the ability of RoboCopy to exclude file types or modified dates.

Solving Migration issues, or delivering a true “Cross Platform” environmentOne of the many unique features of AppSense Environment Manager is its ability manage the complete settings of any application, the registry and the file system, independent of the operating system. Moreover, as AppSense gives complete granular control over which versions of the application or operating system, you can decide which applications you wish to migrate and which to keep platform dependant. As AppSense “Virtualizes” these settings from the operating system, the operating system does not care which operating system version or platform the files and registry are from originally so the Application will always run.

Below is how AppSense Environment Manager delivers true platform independence and allows users to freely roam between Citrix and Fat client desktops within an organization. Or, give a seamless way to migrate users from XP to Windows 7 without any downtime. Furthermore, as AppSense utilizes a centralized management approach to these settings, it provides out of the box redundancy for your user personalized app settings. Remediation and management tools then provide ability to rollback user settings at an applications level in real time to previous setting archives without a logoff or the need for a reboot.

The screen capture to the right illustrates how to configure AppSense Personalization to be cross platform. Notice how on the “Whitelist” there is the option to specify which applications to manage. Then configure which Operating system version “OS RegEX” and to which application version the settings will apply. “Version RegEX”

Note: by configuring the OS RegEX as *. AppSense have enabled seamless cross platform support as settings will apply across all O.S versions


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As AppSense is designed for enterprise environments, all personalization can occur on top of any existing windows profile type such as Local Profiles, Roaming Profiles, TS Profiles or Mandatory Profiles. The AppSense Environment Manager agent sits silently on top of an existing profile infrastructure and begins to collect and manage the settings of the application.

As settings are managed based on triggers such as application launch and close, the process is seamless and unobtrusive to the user and their existing profile experience. Unique functionality makes it possible to quickly migrate user settings through the use of the AppSense “Migration” mode. Eventually, organizations can decide to implement Mandatory Profiles across their organizations to achieve the proven benefits of reduced profile corruption and faster logon times and achieve real world cost reductions.

About Migration Mode: Migration mode is a unique AppSense virtualization technology which will “virtualize on read” the settings for that application; it is useful to more quickly gather application settings during migrations for applications which might not normally write all their settings at application close. Ideally, it is recommended to switch migration mode off soon after initial implementation.

Now that we have examined the real world benefits of AppSense and how the AppSense Personalization technology works, it is time to detail how Environment Manager works and look at a real world examples of implementing AppSense Environment Manager for use in a Desktop Migration or Cross Platform Desktop Delivery implementation.

Example: Seamless email migration to Windows 7 with complete data redundancyFor most organizations, email is the most mission critical application to the business. Here we take a detailed look at how AppSense can deliver Microsoft Outlook 2007 to users and manage customisations to that configuration. Typically, administrators need to manage the MAPI profile so that Outlook knows about its Exchange connection but further, it requires important files on the file system such as DAT files, Email Signatures and pre populated email address lists.

In order to manage Outlook settings it is necessary to deploy an AppSense Environment Manager configuration to the Desktop and apply a relevant configuration with the “Enable Personalization” button configured with the name of the AppSense Personalization Infrastructure server.


Technical Overview

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As mentioned earlier, we need to make sure Outlook is added to a “Whitelist” for the Personalization group. All the users need now do is logon, open the Outlook application, and because “Migration” mode active AppSense captures all settings on first run of Outlook.

To the left is a screen shot of the “Personalization Analysis” which shows an analysis of the captured settings. Note, the Outlook Settings are the largest amount of settings have collected and that they have been grouped together with WinWord. However, they are still extremely small at only 390k in size for both applications.

In order to ensure all settings have been captured, it is possible to right click the settings size report and examine both the captured registry settings and the captured file system settings.

Notice the email signature for user MandyP exists in the list of captured files in the database which is shown in the screen shot to the right, and on the screen shot of the registry below right, it is clear to see that AppSense is also managing the MAPI profile settings.


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After implementing AppSense and managing these Email settings the “Archives” tab is showing there is the ability to rollback user settings seamlessly to any previous state of the application settings.

We now have a completely managed user personality for some core applications; the personalized user application settings for Microsoft Outlook 2007 have been migrated across to the AppSense Personalization server ready for immediate deployment to any Desktop configured with the AppSense Environment Manager agent.

SummaryThis document has detailed how the Policy and Personalization Management features available in AppSense Environment Manager Version 8 are effective solutions for the challenges of desktop management in modern organizations. By delivering true cross platform independence, AppSense has become the industry leading tool for seamless migration to new OS Platforms such as Windows 7 or Virtual Desktops and also solving the day to day challenges for profile issue remediation. AppSense now enables organizations to rethink the way they can most effectively deliver desktop computing environments to their users, and give them the flexibility and tools they need to meet the complex challenges I.T. departments face trying to manage the user environment.


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The information contained in this document (“the Material”) is believed to be accurate at the time of printing, but no representation or warranty is given (express or implied) as to its accuracy, completeness or correctness. Neither AppSense nor the publisher accepts any liability whatsoever for any direct, indirect or consequential loss or damage arising in any way from any use of or reliance placed on this Material for any purpose.

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