I used to contract at a client where one of the systems support engineers was a tad, shall we say, prone to mistakes. Seeing him digging about in AppSense configurations or App-V sequences used to bring me out in a cold sweat. You couldn’t lock him out of the consoles either – he actually needed access to the configurations to update printers and mapped drives, etc., so it was just something we had to put up with.
However, the imminent release of AppSense Environment Manager 8 Feature Release 4 (check out our shiny new terminology!) should bring an end to this with the use of “layered” configurations. You can now “merge” small configurations together into one single unit for deployment to endpoints. So if you had a support team member like the one mentioned above (we’ll call him Frank for posterity), he doesn’t need to go into the entire configuration to make small cosmetic changes. We could simply give him access to the Printers or Mapped Drives parts of the configuration, let him update those, and then we simply merge his altered configuration into the “master” one.
As well as neutralising some of the threat provided by the Franks of this world, this “layering” of configurations should be ideal for larger organizations where different groups need to administer different parts of the configuration, again without having access to the whole thing. Your application packaging team could manage App-V shortcuts, your SQL team could provide ODBC connections, your security team could handle lockdown of the desktop – you get the idea. The AppSense administrators would only need to merge the various configurations into one and deploy it to the endpoints.
Hopefully this layered solution will come with some detection tools built in, so that you can tell when settings may conflict with or override settings from other layers of the configuration. An RSOP-style tool that tells you what the final settings for a user or group will be would be very useful, and I’m fairly sure that AppSense will have features like this available.
It certainly makes for a very interesting addition to the AppSense Environment Manager product, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of the possible applications of this feature in this quick article. As soon as I can get my hands on the new software, we will do a walkthrough on how to put together and deploy a layered configuration, and most importantly, how to troubleshoot it.
I’m not entirely sure yet whether the “layering” feature will be extended to Application Manager and Performance Manager, so I will update on that as soon as I know more.
AppSense Environment Manager Feature Release 4 is due for release “imminently”, so hopefully this means in the next day or so!
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