ProfileUnity 6 – You need this in VMware Horizon

As you may or may not know I worked for a brief time for a bunch of industry friends of mine LiquidwareLabs and was privy to roadmaps and stuff they wanted to do with their products. Well being a partner now of LiquidwareLabs and still very good friends with the crew over there I still get a early glimpse into the goodies. Today they released early access to ProfileUnity 6. Just about everything they promised that would feature in ProfileUnity is a reality now. And the great thing is unlike some more expensive UEM/Profile Management/Persona Management (what ever you want to call it) they managed to keep the cost down, keep the architecture the same and kept the features in 1 product.

These are some of the new features in version 6:

Application Rights Management (ARM) features in ProfileUnity enable Administrators to securely grant specific Standard Users detailed application rights without making them a Windows Administrator. While some User Environment Management (UEM) vendors have separate products at significant additional cost to cover ARM, the new features will be included in ProfileUnity from Liquidware Labs. ProfileUnity’s ARM capabilities include:

• Secure elevation of applications that require Admin rights for standard users
• Allow application installations on persistent virtual or physical for Standard users
• Allow/Deny Process – Whitelist/Blacklist options for installed applications per user

Trigger Points have also been added to ProfileUnity as an option to increase the frequency of User Profile saves and to assign resources such as printers on a real-time context aware basis. Trigger Points now give the ProfileUnity agent the ability to detect environment changes and apply an action.  Examples include:

• Profile sync during session on application open and/or application close
• Location aware printer reassignment during a user session based on session reconnect and/or disconnect
• Assignment of applications, such as RDSH, virtual, or SAAS apps, based on location aware settings that have changed during user session

ProfileUnity gives Windows 8.x Start Menu Choices

While Microsoft has announced that they’ll include a Start Menu in future versions of their OSs, ProfileUnity v6.0 will deliver classic start menu options to Windows 8.x.  Administrators will be able to specify an XP style or Windows 7 style start menu for Windows 8.x.  Liquidware Labs sees this option as a way to increase user adoption of Windows 8.x, helping with user productivity, and ending needless helpdesk calls from users new to the OS.

As soon as I finished upgrading my lab v6 is going in……