AppSense University 2009

October 30, 2009

Last week saw the annual round of AppSense Universities taking place. A gathering of the best consultancy minds from AppSense channel partners and system integrators. The goal of this year’s University was to drive home the AppSense best practices when delivering AppSense solutions and to educate the attendee’s with an increased technical understanding of the Environment Manager product.

It is clear that User Environment Management has become a very hot topic within the technical community and so this year’s attendance was higher than ever with over 50 partners attending the 2 day event. The sessions were a mix of theory and practical work, culminating in an exam that tested both current skill levels and knowledge acquired over the 2 day.  Over 90% of the attendee’s have been working with AppSense for many years, but all that attended commented on how much additional technical content they had obtained by attending the event.

“The University and Inner Circle events give us the ability to educate our partners on areas of the products which may have changed since they attended the Certified Administrator Course and allow us to share our own wealth of knowledge regarding best practice. Partners who attend become more self-sufficient due to the education we provide regarding the inner workings of the products and troubleshooting sessions” – Simon Townsend, Director of Technical Services, AppSense

The practical sessions saw delegates solving real world challenges with ease when using an AppSense Solution.  The practical sessions provided delegates with a technical insight into Environment Manager via the Deep Dive sessions, this included how Environment Manager integrates with the logon process. While the hands on labs enabled delegates to migrate users from a current problematic Roaming Profile to an AppSense Managed Profile, there was also the chance for delegates to get a grasp of all Environment Manager Best practices as well as implement these in the lab sessions.

 The event also provided a solid platform to feedback into AppSense Product Management on features that would like to be seen and features that are already present. The University events prove to be one of the best sources of feed in for product features since the delegates are all seasoned professionals who need solutions to their own unique issue areas.

“Having been to several AppSense Technical Universities, I can genuinely say they are a valuable experience to anyone working with AppSense technology and is looking to expand their customer base in the user environment management space. There is always a great mix of theory, practical lab sessions and open discussion on personal experiences out in the field, which makes the event both educational and informative. It’s also good to see what’s next in terms of product development and refreshing to be able to offer input, which is often incorporated in to the new versions. I’d definitely recommend this event to anyone who is serious about AppSense.” – Simon Mulrain, Senior Consultant, Point to Point.

The exam was received positively with many wanting to test and prove their AppSense knowledge. On a whole the results were fantastic but a special mention must go to Esteem, ADD3, Centralis, ISC and Point to Point whose delegates on the day achieved the top grades.

Most walked away from the event feeling that the content was very relevant, and already asking the dates for the next University. We all look forward to seeing you all again next time.

DSC00783

Photo taken from midway back, right hand side of the room

 

Leave a Comment » | user environment management | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by shepo88

I Love my Hyper-Wee

October 28, 2009

Yes, there I’ve said it, I’m in love with a technology that’s not from AppSense :-)

We had to present at a recent Microsoft Partner event.

Two things Microsoft wanted us to show:

  1. License control for Microsoft Apps in Citrix/Terminal Server/VDI/Streamed App environments, and
  2. How we can simplify Windows 7 migrations.

After a couple of demos from my trusty partner Jacob, they were also all over us about App-V integration.

There was a problem though – none of my demos were running on Hyper-Wee, I mean Hyper-V (must stop listening to PerfMan, his accent is starting to have an effect on me).

So the challenge.

I don’t normally do much between 12 and 6 in the morning, just lying around the house, so let’s rebuild everything on Windows 2008 and Hyper-V.

So a new disk was already available, remove the old one (Dual boot Vista and Win 2003 running VMware Server for VM’s). Demo laptop is a HP (the best) 6710b 4GB ram Dual core 2.4 GHz, with a 300 GB 7200 rpm disk.

Obtain a license, the media and boot up Windows 2008 – 64 bit – yes that’s right, the person who always said 64 bit was not the answer was now asking the question – can I get 64 bit to run all my apps and more importantly will all my drivers work.

To enable Hyper-V you need 64 bit so there was really no option. :-)

The first thing I noticed, Windows 2008 64 bit took around 20 minutes to load!!!!

I sat there thinking there must be something else I’ve missed, surely you can’t load a new O/S in 20 minutes – including the time to format a 140GB partition !!!

But that was it.

Bit of research on the web and now I have to download and run a service pack to get Hyper-V up and running.

Knew there was a catch – the service pack takes about an hour to install :-)

Still not that much effort and time required to get to a new platform. Now the tricky part, what will be the easiest way to get my demo servers back up and running.

More research – turns out there is a freebee download utility available from here http://vmtoolkit.com/files/folders/converters/entry8.aspx which you point at a VMware VM which converts it to a VHD drive, and voila, it runs on Hyper-V.

I did find some extra info about Vm’s that have a SCSI disk as their base – you need to muck around with them a bit and add an IDE disk, so I decided to convert my VMs that used an IDE drive, and rebuild the ones using SCSI.

The longest part of the process was rebuilding the Windows 2003 DC for my AppSense Management Centre.

One thing I was looking for though - a “sleep” mode so I could have my servers boot quicker. When you are meeting a client the last thing you want to do is spend 15 minutes setting up before you start the preso or demo.

I suppose it’s o.k. if you have a big Irishman with you who can tell bad jokes for a while to distract the client, but most of the time I was by myself at appointments.

By accident I discovered the best feature (in my experience) of Hyper-V. Automatically it will snapshot servers if you turn off the host while they are still running. Very cool.

So here’s how my setup for a demo now goes…

08:30 power on laptop, shake hands, exchange cards

08:31 Login to Windows 2008 64bit

08:33 start Hyper-V consoles for my AppSense Management Centre, and my XP desktop

08:34 Demo Environment Manager Personalisation, the crowd goes…..   Oooh…… AAAAAh

08:35 My work here is done

Well not really, but my point is this sucker boots fast, starts my servers faultlessly, and just works.

Of course I have Performance Manager 64 bit running and I have configured it to favour the VM’s as far as CPU and disk priority goes and this definitely helps.

I’m a bit old school, so if I can get something that works for me, I’ll just stick with it. It takes a rocket – or a Microsoft Partner event – to get me to change.

But now that I’ve jumped the 64 bit fence, I’m glad I’m here :-)

Only thing I do have though, is how do I get my Wireless LAN on my notebook working – damn those 64 bit drivers :-)

Leave a Comment » | 2008, Desktop Virtualization, Licensing, Microsoft, Migration, VDI, Win 7, Win7, Windows Server | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by shanewescott

Environment Manager New Feature – Logoff

October 27, 2009

AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 Service Pack 2.0 has introduced some new Logoff functionality.

To enable all Environment Manager actions to complete on logoff and to prevent the logoff black screen from appearing on Vista and Server 2008, the Shutdown Windows API call is detoured.

This API call is called whenever a user logs off or shuts down the system. The detour allows Environment Manager to:

  • Trigger Environment Manager logoff actions
  • Prevent logoff continuing until all Environment Manager actions have completed

When Environment Manager actions are completed or a 60 second default timeout has been passed logoff continues allowing any remaining processes to shut down before Windows itself shuts down. You can override the default timeout by setting a millisecond value in the “LogoffActionWaitTimeout” registry key. Since Environment Manager has already completed its work, it will not be a cause of the Windows logoff black screen.

Whilst the Environment Manager logoff actions are taking place, the system is effectively stalled and the user may wonder what is happening. To alleviate their concerns, a custom screen can be displayed informing the user that Environment Manager is busy. The screen is activated when text for the screen is configured from within the Blocked Text Library.

Adding an entry to the Blocked Text Library with the Title Logoff Message will allow a custom message to be specified for display.

Note: Once logoff continues, Environment Manager has effectively finished for the user session, therefore no more Policy Configuration actions or User Personalization will take place. Additionally, if another application decides to misbehave at this point, the black screen may still appear for those applications.

Leave a Comment » | general, Group Policy, user environment management | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Oliver Sills

Integration between internet or cloud delivered applications

October 14, 2009

Brian Madden has started a thread about one of the areas that I see as being absolutely critical to the delivery of client computing from the cloud:

 http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/brianmadden/archive/2009/10/14/we-need-a-new-user-settings-framework-before-rich-internet-apps-will-replace-windows-apps.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

As I see it, in all of the discussion about cloud computing there is one aspect of cloud delivered client computing that has got little public attention so far and that is the subject of integration between Internet or cloud delivered applications. To illustrate what I mean; imagine a user who has finished editing an image and wants to send it to colleagues. In a traditional desktop the image editing program knows where to look to find an email program that works on behalf of the user. If the applications are now provided by different suppliers then there is currently no way for one application to signal that it wants the help of another.

Being able to do this is taken for granted on traditional desktops because everything runs in one place and a mixture of the registry, inter process communication and configuration files take care of communications. In moving to the cloud one of the great benefits we get is the ability to buy services from different suppliers and to move freely between suppliers. However, this breaks the integration model. You could say that these applications would have to be provided by a single supplier, but that argument quickly leads to all applications being supplied by a single service provider. This is not cloud computing it is outsourcing, a valid model but not the same as cloud computing.

What is needed is needed is a mechanism that allows unified policy and personalization to be delivered between multiple cloud providers. Sounds a lot like User Environment Management, doesn’t it? One of my goals is to establish such a mechanism so that customers have a single place to control all of the interactions between their cloud delivered services. This is the only way organizations will have an efficient way to add additional services and the freedom to move between providers.

Leave a Comment » | Cloud, Desktop Virtualization, user environment management | Permalink
Posted by Martin Ingram

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