AppSense Management Suite for Citrix XenDesktop: User Environment Management

Used in conjunction with Citrix XenDesktop, the AppSense Management Suite significantly reduces desktop management costs while ensuring maximum user adoption and productivity.  By separating all user aspects of the desktop from the base image, corporate PC images can be standardized across groups of users.

With AppSense Management Suite, this low-cost base image is transformed into the users familiar, personal PC whenever the user needs it.

Personal settings, files, applications and access rights are dynamically applied to a standard PC image on access, whether that PC is delivered via XenDesktop, XenApp, local installation, software distribution, applications virtualization, or any combination thereof.


IT are now able to combine delivery mechanisms, migrate users between operating system platforms, or seamlessly swap out applications and upgrade the corporate desktop image with no impact to the user experience.

Used in combination with your Citrix XenDesktop environment, AppSense provides:

• Personalization of complex environments - with multi-platform support
• A 'Follow-Me' user personality - consistent experience regardless of platform or device
• Virtual desktop configuration - to configure a desktop based on user or device context
• Intelligent self-healing -  increasing desktop robustness and optimizing the user experience
• Visibility and maintenance - enabling adherence to SLA's and reducing support costs

For further information

Contact:  CitrixReadyCatalog@AppSense.com


Key AppSense Web Pages

AppSense Homepage:
www.AppSense.com

Further information on the AppSense Management Suite is available at: www.AppSense.com/XenDesktop

Joint Citrix & AppSense customer references and case studies can be found at:
www.AppSense.com/thecompany/customers

End users can also download their free 21 day evaluation software at:
www.AppSense.com/evaluate

KEY BENEFITS

• Accelerates desktop migration
• Enables standardization of virtual desktop image
• Increases business agility
• Improves user logon times
• Reduces support and management costs
• Eliminates roaming profile corruption and bloat
• Enforce licensing, ensure compliance
• User acceptance

APPSENSE USER ENVIRONMENT MANAGEMENT FEATURES

User Profile Migration
Quickly and easily migrate user profile data between desktops. Users can be migrated from PC or server based computing environments to virtual desktops without having to re-create personalization settings. Profile data can also be migrated between operating systems and applications enabling rapid desktop upgrade.

Personalization Streaming
Rather than loading and unloading large amounts of profile data at logon and logoff, which increases logon times and risk of profile corruption, AppSense Environment Manager streams portions of the user profile in response to user actions. Policy and personalization is applied to the environment as applications and operating system features are used.

Personalization Rollback
One of the most common and time consuming tasks for IT support is resolving profile related support cases.  Reduced support costs and time to repair damaged profiles can be realized by taking scheduled snapshots of the profile and if required, rolling back to a previous known good profile for a user on a per application basis.

Offline Mode
Both policy and personalization data is accessible to the user in a disconnected state. The user now has a fully portable personality, which is re-synchronized with the latest settings when the user comes back online.

Self Healing
Automatically self heal files, registry items, services and processes, in real-time, to prevent user introduced changes or actions from compromising system integrity.

Application Usage Scan
Scan a target device and identify how many times individual applications have been executed on a per user basis. By highlighting which applications are being used and which are not, unlicensed software can be identified and restricted and licensed software can be removed, reducing both the number of applications available to a device and licensing costs.

Application Network Access Control
Control network access without complex controls such as routers, switches and firewalls. Outbound connections from a target device are subject to entitlement rules. Connections include access to UNC paths (including all files & folders on that drive), servers, IP addresses, URLs, devices & FTP locations. Policy can be tailored to dynamically change based on user or device properties.

COMING SOON:
User Installed Applications
Enable users to install and access personal productivity applications in non-persistent XenDesktop environments.  The user installed applications are stored separately from the desktop image and applied to the next session as part of the assembly process.  Applications are now available in the XenDesktop session, regardless of where or how the user accesses it.

AppSense for VDI overview

In today's economic climate, Citrix and AppSense understand the need to reduce IT costs and maximize available budget in a tangible way. AppSense technology has been proven in thousands of Citrix XenApp customer sites to significantly reduce IT costs and provide Return on Investment in just a matter of months.

Reduction in Profile Corruption
Profile corruption leads to employee downtime and dissatisfaction. IT spend time troubleshooting and rebuilding the user profiles, an unnecessary operational cost to the organization.

AppSense significantly reduces the occurrence of profile corruption, with some customers experiencing complete elimination of profile corruption and profile related support calls.

"It took less than two weeks to collect all of the user profile information and convert it to AppSense profiles. As soon as this was completed, our profile corruption completely disappeared. Given we were previously having at least one user per day experiencing some form of inconvenience as a result of profile corruption, this was a great result."

Andy Fisher, Manager of Technical Services, UTMB

Reduce Microsoft Application License Costs

Microsoft applications are licensed on a per-device basis, meaning a license is required for each device that is able to access the application. This model requires more consideration when applications are installed centrally on a server or in a virtual desktop, as applications may be licensed for more devices than there are users who run the application.

Using AppSense, a granular rule set enables the Administrator to restrict access to applications by device name or IP address, reducing the required number of Microsoft licenses.

"AppSense gives the ability to control the users and devices that have access to specific applications, thereby avoiding the purchase of enormous number of superfluous licenses."

Dave Thomas, CIO, Chandler Macleod

For more examples please go to the AppSense Cost Reduction Page