New Year for Desktop Management

Happy New Year !

Earlier this week, we organized a seminar at Brussels concerning 'Desktop Management'. During this seminar, I discussed 3 tools/technologies that can help you a lot in dealing with the front-end experience of business users. Business users are those people that have to get their job done without having to care about what is behind. The 3 tools are:

• Terminal Server / Citrix
  
• Softricity
• PowerFuse
  

In order to explain what these tools can do for the business, I developed 3 'prototype' cases in which they can be applied. Using imaginary cases has the benefit that you can create a solution that is clearly suited for the case. Real-life situations are not like this, those are always 'grey' and have to be analyzed carefully based on business and IT requirements and total cost of ownership.

Interested in the topics? Leave a comment!

Softricity & McAfee

Whooo, I recently spent 4 hours trying to debug some issues that appeared with both sequencing and running applications:

• In explorer: Folder Options – View: Advanced Settings is empty
• No drag-and-drop possible
  
• No command prompt (error message at start, or immediate closing)
• Right-click context menu is broken (empty regions)

How I managed to get around these issues? One way is to uninstall McAfee Virus Scan from the system, but that's not the most secure solution. The best way is to make sure first Softricity is installed and only then the McAfee tools.

On the sequencer, I recommend not to install McAfee at all, but more about this later.

Disaster Recovery Plan

I'm currently involved in a disaster recovery design project. A company has two sites; what if one of those sites goes down? A very interesting question. The parts that make up the design are: Citrix and Softricity. This combination allows for a great number of parallel paths of access in case of a disaster, without the need to roll out a couple of hundred fat clients.

Stay tuned for more information!

Adobe Professional & Softricity

Adobe Professional is a tough one to package using Softricity. Moreover, the outcome of the sequence depends largely on the sequencing environment.

Especially, when it comes to printing. For example, if you package Adobe Pro on a sequencer with a printer installed, your sequence will probably work while if no printer is installed, printing will not work. Just try it out! The reason is clear: when no printer is installed, the complete registry hive containing printer configuration is created during monitoring and as a consequence, virtualized.

What do you need to do? It depends:

• For non-TS environments:
• Locate HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\Windows
• Delete the value "device" (remove the entire value, and not just the data in the value)
• For TS environments:
• Locate HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion
• Delete the whole of "devices"

Softricity Packaging Info and Links

Want more info concerning Softricity packaging? Me too. Even after having packaged more than 30 applications, including Adobe Professional, additional tips and tricks are always welcome!

Here are some links to discussions forums:

• http://www.softgridguru.com/
• http://www.softricity.com
  
• http://portal.loginconsultants.nl/forum/index.php?board=25

You can also follow our course at Guidance (www.guidance.be) which delves deep into the details of packaging with Softricity.