When I’m trying to extol the virtues of the AppSense Management Suite to peers, I’m often faced with this statement – “it’s good for larger enterprises”. This perception appears to be based around the current real-world usage of the software and partly also to the way it is portrayed on the AppSense website. To be fair, it’s hard to condense what you can do with AppSense into a succinct webpage (with so many different parts and ways to use it, this is a problem not limited to AppSense, in all honesty). It’s a suite of software that can often not be about what it is commonly used for or intended to be used for, but more for the innovative ways you can use it yourself to improve your own unique environment. I’m not going to get into the whole “what can you do with it?” debate – that’s something for a series of blog posts I’ve been pulling together for months now – but concentrate more on whether it’s correct to say that it’s simply for the larger enterprise. In my own humble opinion, I don’t think that’s a fair statement to make.
Of course, it always starts with the price. AppSense Management Suite isn’t the cheapest piece of kit in the world, and for smaller businesses this is always the first sticking point. I don’t know whether AppSense do discounts for non-profits or educational institutions (educate me!), but whether they do or not, to get a smaller enterprise to buy into something like this there has to be some serious value in it for them.
There’s also the association with XenApp and VDI systems that often goes with AppSense to consider, systems that traditionally smaller enterprises have been unable or unwilling to implement. But that’s changing. I’ve seen small deployments of XenApp, RDS and VMWare View, and with the advent of things like Citrix’s VDI-In-A-Box, the school of thought that associates these systems with larger enterprises is slowly turning around. But you don’t need these sorts of shared systems to be able to get value from AppSense – it works just as well on standard Windows endpoints too.
The main points to consider centre around how much does a small business expend on things like
- Profile-related issues (especially when using standard roaming profiles)
- Issues related to users holding administrator rights (installing non-standard software, picking up malware, deleting files and folders they shouldn’t, etc.)
- Issues related to users needing admin rights (adding devices, debugging programs, changing minor settings)
- Issues related to configuring new user software (deployment, packaging, testing, etc.)
- Control of licensing for software
- Maintaining appropriate standards in the user environment
- Documenting and implementing non-standard fixes to achieve user goals
- Time and resources expended to allow users to maintain a familiar environment when roaming across different endpoint devices, OS platforms and business locations, or issues arising from not maintaining a familiar environment
I’ve seen businesses with as little as 120 or so users suffering badly from the above problems, to the extent that they had IT staff unable to concentrate on forward-looking projects due to trying to fight fires based around some of the problems highlighted. Some of them had also tried to take up XenApp and virtualization projects to address some of the issues and found them sadly lacking in some areas, which had only exacerbated the problems further by creating new ones.
In one particular case the profile-related problems were paramount. Two support staff were performing twenty or thirty profile resets a week, resulting in users losing their familiar desktop settings, having to reconfigure applications, and generally suffering from interruptions to their productivity. Needless to say, this became a vicious circle as users grew more and more frustrated and the support staff tired of explaining that there wasn’t an easier way to avoid such problems. This in turn led to users employing other, insecure ways of working just to avoid these problems and increasing the IT department’s headaches further.
For this client we ended up putting together a standard, locked-down mandatory profile and deploying a XenApp published desktop with all their applications either installed on the XenApp servers or delivered via the Citrix Online Plug-In. The user settings and environment were controlled and virtualized using AppSense Environment Manager with a full Personalization Server deployment. Straight away the profile reset issues went away – if a user reported a problem with Outlook, for instance, the Outlook settings could be deleted from the Personalization Server and the problematic part of the profile “reset” without affecting any of their other applications or their desktop persona. Environment Manager could also be used to pre-configure various parts of their environment without the need for complex scripting – for instance, automatically setting up Office Communicator with a standard set of contacts. It also turned out that a new piece of in-house software required some peculiar sets of folders and configuration files to work correctly – instead of visiting every endpoint to set this up, it was all done through Environment Manager Process Started actions. Users no longer had a lot of their previous bugbears, such as huge sets of inaccessible printers or long logon times, and when they visited the remote offices they were surprised to find that they now logged on and received an identical desktop to that at HQ. The improvement in the general day-to-day support of the environment improved to such an extent that one of the two support staff had their job redefined to spend half of every week developing applications – something the staff member wanted to do, and which also allowed the company to get more from him for his wages, an all-round win.
There was of course the initial learning curve and expenditure centred around the setup of AppSense and instructing the IT staff in how to administer it, but AppSense has come a long way toward being more user-friendly and better-documented. In the latest version there are wizard-driven setups to simplify things more, and a self-service portal for users to avoid even having to call the helpdesk to reset profiles to previous states.
Once the staff had learned how to use it, I found they were innovating using the software to do things they couldn’t with standard tools. As a case in point, if the Exchange Information Store was restarted during working hours for any reason, a huge amount of users would notice the “connection lost” message in Outlook and call the helpdesk. To avoid this storm, the support staff used AppSense EM’s lockdown tool to remove the Connection Status button from Outlook and avoid a flood of helpdesk calls. Notwithstanding the debate around removing a part of the interface that can be used for troubleshooting, the IT department in this case found a way to reduce their workload through using one of the other features of EM. They also disabled the F11 button in Internet Explorer for a particular user who kept sending IE full-screen and couldn’t work out how to disable it again, and removed the Sticky Keys functionality for another user who had a habit of accidentally turning it on.
And that was just the EM part. They also successfully used Performance Manager to avoid issues on XenApp systems related to wayward searches, and configured it to get a higher user density on their Citrix servers. I also deployed Application Manager to give them the extra security of a whitelisting solution, and last I heard they were also using AM to allow their developers to debug programs without needing administrator rights and deploy the required permissions to allow AutoCAD to run on the Citrix platform. All of this in an environment with about 120 users and 1.5 full-time IT support staff. There was an initial layout associated with this – as there is with everything – but even if you simply count the half a week less required for IT support as the only ROI (which it isn’t), that still adds up to a saving of £40k over four years against the software price.
I’m well aware that with Group Policy Preferences Microsoft have provided functionality for any small AD shop to perform a vast array of user environment configuration, but that’s just another reason for thinking AppSense doesn’t have any application for smaller customers – the myth that it’s just an advanced logon script program. It does a lot more than the EM piece now – and if the likes of Strata Apps and DataNow become integrated into the Management Suite, it’s definitely going to have even more mileage for customers of any size. Maybe what’s needed is some basic configurations to be provided “out-of-the-box” to get customers up and running and starting to realize the potential of the product without a lot of trial-and-error, and that’s something I hope to be able to provide in future posts. But I think, in my humble opinion, that pigeonholing the AppSense Management Suite as something that’s unsuitable for the smaller enterprise is not particularly fair and probably completely untrue. I’ve managed to make it an invaluable piece of kit for smaller businesses, and I think if they could get some demonstrations of what you can achieve with the software (again, something I’m working on producing here), we might see this perception that it’s for big boys only starting to change in the same way it did for shared storage and virtualization.
Share
