The enhancements within Workspace Manager 2011, are focused on the following areas:

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1 What s new in Workspace Manager February 2011

2 Summary During the lifecycle of PowerFuse 2010, the product s name changed to RES Workspace Manager. With the release of RES Workspace Manager 2011, the new product name and branding is reflected in the management console, splash screens, product icons and more. While it may look different, Workspace Manager 2011 builds on the proven PowerFuse technology that RES Software has developed for many years. Workspace Manager 2011, combined with the latest version of RES Automation Manager 2011, give organizations more powerful functionality than ever before, and combined help pave the way for creating dynamic desktops. The enhancements within Workspace Manager 2011, are focused on the following areas: Modular approach to Workspace Manager that allows an organization to pace its movement toward dynamic desktops: o Composition & Personalization o Advanced Administration o Security & Performance Security (User Installed Applications, Websites, Dynamic Privileges) Service Orchestration integration Database migration and split Support Microsoft Office 2010 User settings templates More than 35 additional enhancements and fixes are delivered. More details can be found in the release notes of the upgrade. 2 P a g e

3 Security Dynamic Privileges In information security, the principle of least privilege requires that in a particular user session, every module (such as a process, a user or a program) must be able to access only information and resources that are necessary for its legitimate purpose. In other words, this means giving a user only those privileges which are absolutely essential to do his/her work. For example, a backup user does not need to install software. Hence the backup user has rights only to run backup and backup related applications with elevated privileges. Any other application will run with normal user privileges. Dynamic Privileges allow IT professionals to have users work with normal user privileges and only elevate those processes to the appropriate level to perform tasks that require administrator privileges. More companies are striving to implement the principle of least privilege. Also, some Windows XP applications malfunction on the more restricted Windows 7 operating system. Without Dynamic Privileges, an IT professional is forced to increase the account permissions of a user to Power User, or even Administrator, for specific actions within applications. But assigning higher permissions than necessary decreases the level of security. 3 P a g e

4 Whitelisting/ Blacklisting User Installed Applications The IT professional can now control what applications are allowed to be installed by a group of users. The following properties can be validated before allowing installation: MD5 checksum or Publisher certificate and/or Product name in setup and/or Product version in setup Security regulations of a customer only allowed users to install a set of software in their workspace. Without whitelisting/blacklisting of user installed applications, the user with installation permissions can install anything. Microsoft Windows 7 has a feature AppLocker, that might be used to achieve the same goal through group policy objects. AppLocker is computer centric and not context centric. Website Security An IT professional can now control which websites are allowed to be visited with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Whitelisting and blacklisting is supported. Security regulations of a customer required control over website access. Usually website security is managed on infrastructure level with proxy servers. These solutions are often based on security group membership at the corporate level. Context-centric security is not possible with these alternatives. 4 P a g e

5 Enhancements Service Orchestration Integration An end user s workspace can now be served with servicecentric IT when combined with RES Automation Manager Service Orchestration. With Service Orchestration users can request services, while the requested service is approved by the responsible person in an organization. To enable a truly dynamic workspace, service-centric IT is essential. Database Migration Wizard The IT professional can now migrate an existing RES Workspace Manager datastore to a new database server. Customers that migrated their Workspace Manager datastore to different database servers or environments had to do this with either the database supported management consoles or Workspace Manager building blocks. The database migration wizard makes these kind of tasks much easier. Manual database management tasks in the appropriate database management suite. Support for Microsoft Office 2010 Allows IT professionals to manage Microsoft Office 2010 applications with all RES Workspace Manager functionality, such as templates, DDE, etc. After the release to the Web of Microsoft Office 2010 (April 22, 2010), multiple customers are planning the upgrade of the existing Microsoft Office to Microsoft Office Workspace Manager integrates with Microsoft Office with templates and DDE. - 5 P a g e

6 User Settings Templates Assist IT professionals in configuring targeted items for applications of Windows settings. Targeted items consist of registry and file locations with user settings. IT professionals can now select a template with targeted items from a list of common user settings, such as Windows user settings, Microsoft Office user settings and more. Known limitations: - Device/ hardware related user settings are not supported - User settings that require administrative privileges are not supported - Default input language on Windows 7 is not supported by the Regional and Language Options template. Customers that want to manage user settings that are stored in an existing roaming profile have to spend a lot of time defining the targeted items for each application. Without RES Workspace Manager, application-specific user settings are stored in a roaming profile. This roaming profile includes a lot of overhead and is difficult to manage across different operating system versions. Restore User Settings from Console Allows IT professionals to restore individual user settings on application level or session level from the central management console, without having to impact the Windows user profile of the user. The capability was already available in the Workspace Preferences for the end user and will now also be available for the IT professional. Without RES Workspace Manager, IT professionals have only one option delete the entire roaming profile to restore user settings to their default. All user settings will be lost in this case. 6 P a g e

7 Specify Citrix folder and Load Evaluator for Published Applications The IT professional can now configure a specific folder in the Citrix XenApp farm for application publishing. In the past, a single predefined folder was used. Customers with large Citrix XenApp farms have permissions set per folder of published applications. By automatically placing the Workspace Manager managed application in the right container in the Citrix XenApp farm, existing delegation of control could be maintained. Ability to Store Usage Tracking and Log data in Separate Databases IT professionals can now use a split/join wizard to store usage tracking and/or log data in a separate database. In large Workspace Manager environments the usage tracking database can grow enormously. Large databases have impact on performance and capacity. By allowing IT professionals to split usage tracking and/or log data from the configuration and state data, performance and capacity can be optimized. Capture Targeted Items Once, then Track Further Changes It is now possible to capture user settings from an existing roaming profile once, and then automatically switch to user setting changes only on application level. The capability to capture settings once from an existing roaming profile and then automatically switch to user setting changes only on application level allows IT professional to move away from roaming profiles. Without this feature, the switch to Track changes mode of Zero Profile Technology can only be achieved by deleting the existing roaming profile. This will remove all existing personalization for the user. Without RES Workspace Manager Zero Profile Technology, 7 P a g e

8 application-specific user settings are stored in a roaming profile. This roaming profile includes a lot of overhead and is difficult to manage across different operating system versions. Script Tab IT professional can now edit and store script directly in Composition>Other>Execute Command. In the past, scripts used by Execute Command had to be stored as Custom Resource and invoked by variables. Using scripts is now much easier for IT professionals. Group policy objects allow IT professional to execute scripts per computer or user. Group policy objects are not context centric and therefor require more advanced scripting to achieve context awareness. Remote Host/ URL Zone Rule for Locations and Devices and Connection State Location detection can now check for an Internet address to be reachable from the RES Workspace Manager agent. The following Internet addresses are supported: IP address IP address + IP port URL (http or https) Advanced location detection was required to support direct access. - 8 P a g e

9 Session Type Zone Rule for Locations and Devices Location detection can now detect a session such as remote session to Citrix XenApp, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services or VDI. Supported session types: Remote/Local desktop, Remote application Microsoft RDP, Citrix ICA Desktop or server platform Multiple customers needed the ability to detect session type, to offer different content to VDI sessions. Suppress RES Automation Manager Invoked Installation The end-user can now suppress an RES Automation Manager installation and continue working. When the installation is finished, the end-user is notified about the installed application. Installations that needed a lot of time, prevented the end-user from continue working. There are no real alternatives to provide context-centric application installation initiated by the user. Alternatives would be to distribute the software with systems like System Center Configuration Manager or LANDesk Management Suite that are computer centric. Agent Related Errors IT professionals can now view agent-related errors on the appropriate Agent in Diagnostic\Agents Overview. This enhancement will ease the troubleshooting process of specific agents. 9 P a g e

10 Linked Application Actions IT professionals can now configure a single instance of an application and link similar applications to the already configured actions. This enhancement will minimize the amount of configuration of similar managed applications. Database Size IT professionals can now view the database size in the Database Connection Overview. IT professionals no longer need to open the database administrator console to view the database size. IT professional can view the database size in the appropriate database management suite. 10 P a g e