User Experience is the hot buzz-phrase du jour. Vendors in the end user computing space want to associate their product with it. Often you’ll hear and see claims like, “we enhance user experience” or “we make desktop user experience better.” And while I agree with these sentiments, I can’t help but think the issue isn’t about flowery marketing language, but about taking the subjective and making it actionable for the benefit of IT operations.

Meeting user expectations and delivering user experience is hard. Translating what is inside your users head and defining IT process and operations around meeting these subjective desires can be an almost impossible goal without the right visibility detail. About a year ago I wrote about Baselining the User Experience and Defining a Measure of Success with Stratusphere UX. I wrote about the shift towards using user experience as a definition of success and the opportunity to define SLA and KPIs that can quantify your approach.

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If you are a former AppSense or RES customer and are uneasy about changes from your longstanding UEM solution in the wake of acquisitions by Ivanti, consider Liquidware ProfileUnity.

We’ve made it Easy to Switch
We’ve recently on-boarded several large customers with 5,000, 10,000 and 20,000+ user desktops.  We’ve even developed a best practice methodology to get your users switched for minimum or zero downtime. We even have trained AppSense and RES staff to help you with the transition! Furthermore, we now have an additional European office in the Netherlands to service this area. Continue reading →

The ability to meet expectations and deliver the appropriate user-experience on shared infrastructure platforms such as VMware View and Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop can be a complex and a challenging endeavor. One of the ways you can stay ahead of the curve is through a point-in-time analysis called the SpotCheck. Liquidware engineers and our partner community have been using Stratusphere UX and this technique—leveraging known levels of acceptable performance and baselines—to identify infrastructure and platform constraints that can contribute to a poor user-experience.

The SpotCheck inspection takes a broad look at overall infrastructure and platform health as a means to provide a picture of resource usage and performance of the virtual or cloud environment. The objectives of the SpotCheck are as follows:

• Provide a 360° view of virtual desktop resource use and performance
• Gain visibility of critical issues, both known and unknown
• Identify and provide analysis of performance issues
• Establish real-world baselines to gauge normal/abnormal operations
• Document and report on findings

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Many Citrix, VMware, and Microsoft RDSH customers leverage ProfileDisk and Profile Containers to handle large profiles for non-persistent VDI and RDSH environments. ProfileUnity accomplishes this by containerizing all or part a users profile to virtual disk. One of the use many ProfileDisk use cases that has been proven over the years is Office 365 Cached Mode & Indexing. ProfileUnity also has the ability to “containerize” parts of the profile onto VHDs that the solution automatically manages.

Office 365 cached mode is especially useful for Outlook by placing a local copy of your mailbox(es) on your desktop. This local copy performs more seamlessly than relying on a network/cloud copy of the same mailbox(es).  The problem with this on with non-persistent VDI comes because mailboxes are rather large, often gigabytes in size. Folder redirection, roaming profiles, profile tools from Citrix & VMware, and Microsoft UE-V can’t handle this use case for many reasons.

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If you are a first time user of Application Layering technology you may be overwhelmed by the choices. You may also be wondering, “What applications should I start with?” In short, just about any application that does not require full application isolation is a GOOD candidate for FlexApp Layering, so your options are nearly limitless.

Some applications may require frequent updates or put stress on IO subsystems. Many line of business applications need to be ‘always available’ for the business to function. For DR, companies have invested storage replication for critical systems. However, this is not the case for virtual desktops which can be the most critical systems of them all.

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In this short video, Jason E. Smith and Kevin Cooke deliver an overview of Liquidware Essentials, which includes ProfileUnity to decouple user profiles from the OS, FlexApp to deliver Windows applications to any hosted virtual or physical desktop and Stratusphere UX to provide visibility to the desktop workload and user experience you are delivering.

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Last week Citrix Synergy 2018 happened in Anaheim, California. This was the 21^st Citrix Synergy by my calculation. I was at the first Citrix “Thinergy” in 1998 at the Swan Hotel in Orlando. The conference remains one of the most Windows desktop focused conferences in the industry.

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