Many many moons ago (well, version 7, actually) AppSense had a USB lockdown feature. You could deny or allow USB access, or restrict users to Read or Read-Write access to the devices, based around the usual configurable conditions. It wasn’t the best implementation of this I’d ever seen, and it didn’t always work, but it was another string on the bow of the entire Management Suite. I was a bit disappointed this was killed off in version 8.
I was told that USB lockdown wasn’t a feature that was really considered necessary to AppSense’s Management Suite any more, and I can kind of see where they were coming from, although I think personally it would still fit under the Application Manager umbrella somewhere, as it’s about controlling execution through access. Anyways – the point I am trying to make is that if this functionality has been removed from the core products, couldn’t it make a comeback somewhere under the AppSense Labs arm, which has given us DataNow and StrataApps, both of which are good additions to the whole AppSense family?
It’s just a bit disappointing when you can’t do this sort of thing through AppSense, as it has lockdown tools for just about everything else and when you’ve sold people on the features of this product, they seem a little disappointed to find something it can’t do (especially when they usually have to shell out some money for something that can do it). In these situations, telling them that it used to do it but that it was removed from the latest version is usually a good way to a free black eye. The most annoying thing is, there isn’t really a market-leading product out there for this functionality that I’ve seen yet, especially something that can do this effectively and easily on thin clients with pass-through to XenApp sessions. Controlling USB access on a per-application basis would be way cool – and that’s the sort of granularity I associate AppSense with providing. So come on AppSense, get your Labs guys to resurrect the USB device control code from version 7 and give us a utility to play with. There’s a bit of a space there, in my humble opinion.
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