As discussed in an earlier post, a common usage of the Process Started trigger is to import GPOs specific to certain applications at application launch time, rather than logon time. For instance, you may have a whole host of GPOs for Microsoft Excel that you load when the excel.exe process starts, saving your users valuable seconds in their login time.
But what happens if a user is on a published desktop, and could launch Microsoft Excel multiple times in the same XenApp session? Now you are using up vital resources by importing GPOs that already have been written into the user’s profile. This is where Flow Control conditions come in (formerly known as RunOnce conditions in earlier versions of EM).
The Flow Control condition is not available in the Startup, Shutdown, Logon and Logoff triggers, as these triggers happen only once per user session or computer launch. In the example below, I have already created a Process Started node for Microsoft Excel 2007. You access the condition by right-clicking the node and choosing Conditions | Flow Control | Counter
The configuration of the Flow Control condition is very simple – select the amount of times you want the child condition or conditions (which in this case will be the GPO settings) to apply in a single session (a “session” ends when a user logs out or a computer shuts down, dependent on whether you are using the User or Computer fixed node for this). In this case, we want the settings to be applied at the first launch of Excel only, so we leave the counter at 1.
Finally, we add the GPO ADMX actions that we wanted to use for Excel 2007 into the parent condition
So now, once we save the configuration and deploy it as usual, we can be assured that GPO actions for our published desktop users will only run the specified amount of times, saving resources that are often scarce on busy XenApp/RDS systems.
Update – the use of Flow Control actions is particularly useful when using Outlook 2010, as AppSense report that this application can apparently spawn a second process when setting a signature item. Therefore, Flow Control is the recommended way of avoiding this issue.
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