ProfileUnity is an industry leading product of User and Persona management in a physical and virtual environment. When you add FlexApp it brings in the ability to package, manage, and deploy applications. This can be done with User installed Applications (UIA) and Department installed Applications (DIA). It is an enterprise level solution used by many organizations world-wide, solving many different use cases. However sometimes even the simplest real world situations can show the true of power of ProfileUnity and FlexApp and how easily it can help manage your environment and solve problems quickly.

I heard a story about a school that was using ProfileUnity.  The teacher had a class accessing a Web site but it was incompatible with IE and the teacher needed Firefox to present the web site correctly.  The teacher had 40 minutes left in class and called IT in a panic.  IT said give me 10 minutes.   IT had FlexApp setup but was not using it as they only received it with ProfileUnity. But since they had set it up he quickly installed FireFox into FlexApp and in 10 minutes called the teacher and asked the students logout and log back in.  Whalaa – FireFox was available to users and the class was able to access the site.

Consider this vs. Booting a base image, installing FireFox, regression testing other apps since FF (or another app in the future) could have broken something else in the main image (happens all the time — think Citrix metaframe), then recomposing the images and pushing the updated image to the storage. (This last step ALONE could be 60 full minutes and kill the storage performance in many companies!)

The end result — the teacher is sold on VDI, the IT guy looked like a hero, the students got their lesson completed!

For additional information on ProfileUnity and FlexApp you can reference the ProfileUnity Product Page.

David Bieneman

Liquidware Labs

www.liquidwarelabs.com