Citrix empfiehlt AppSense Environment Manager

Sumit Dhawan (Vice President für Citrix XenDesktop bei Citrix) schreibt in seinen Blog “What’s the scoop on ‘user personalization’ for virtual desktops and what should we be expecting?” über die Notwendigkeit der User Personalization.

Er grenzt hierbei auch genau ab, was Citrix bereits im XenDesktop zur Verfügung stellt. Sumit sieht folgende 5 Hauptanforderungen an eine User Personalization Lösung:

Starting with managed user profiles or equivalent – A system that can store user settings and personalization changes. A system that can provide an easy and fast way to manage the settings for users. This is included as part of XenDesktop and gets you started with your personalized virtual desktops.

Getting On-demand ‘personality’ – To increase the responsiveness of the desktop and logon, only provide parts of the user personality required by the user at the time when needed. Why load what a user is not going to use?

Allowing user-centric configuration – This may be a bit counter-intuitive to personalization; however, role based configuration is a critical component of making every user’s desktop ‘personal’. It starts with configuring which applications a user has access to. XenDesktop (with XenApp as an application management system) offers the ability to control the applications. IT may need more granular control – such as what printers users will need and what drives they can access.

System self-healing from user errors – To be able to automatically roll back to pre-configured user settings in case any personalized changes made by zero conflict centralized configurations.

Ensuring visibility – Giving IT the ability to see into the user environment and solve potential problems before the user gets involved creates a continuously improving desktop estate as well as reducing costs

Die Punkte 1 (Starten mit der Verwaltung von Benutzerprofilen) und 3 (Zentrale Konfiguration) sind in der XenDesktop Lösung von Citrix enthalten. Alle weiteren Punkte sollten durch eine User Personalization Lösung, gerade in Enterprise Umgebungen, erreicht werden. Hierbei geht er explizit auf den AppSense Environment Manager ein und beschreibt diese Möglichkeiten.