It’s about a month ago that we released Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced Edition. The number of downloads and the positive feedback from our customers is way beyond our expectations. It looks like our profile management solutions is something many IT professionals are looking for. But why is that so?

User demands are sky-rocketing when it comes to modern IT infrastructures – leading to elevated expectations regarding computer usability, application performance and workspace control. In other words, today’s users want to be the center of the IT universe. They want to be in full control of their workspace and application settings, and they expect IT to work smoothly no matter if they are online or offline. This common vision of a user-centric application infrastructure encourages organizations to introduce desktop and application virtualization technologies on a large scale.

Windows user profiles play an important role in a modern desktop and application infrastructure as they preserve the individual settings between interactive logins. The profile management functionality built into Microsoft Windows is challenged by today’s requirements including multiple desktops per users, various application publishing methods and a range of virtualization technologies. As a consequence, profile management gets more and more attention as a profile is like a user’s digital personality, represented by the individual workspace and application settings. Today’s users expect that their personal settings are following them, independent of their physical location, Windows version, desktop engine and application delivery method.

Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced Edition optimizes the management of user profiles for Windows desktops and applications provided through local workstations, terminal servers, Citrix Presentation Server / XenApp or Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (both 32-bit and 64-bit). This includes the application-specific handling of both registry settings and configuration files during user logon, user logoff, application launch, or application termination events.  Individual configuration files for different applications and workspace settings allow modifying the behavior of the Immidio Flex Profiles logic. Immidio Flex Profiles can be used in conjunction with local profiles, roaming profiles or mandatory profiles.

The advantage of Immidio Flex Profiles is that you get the performance and stability of mandatory or local profiles while still having the ability to retain customized user settings from their sessions. Simple INI configuration files determine which registry settings, files or folders should be retained within the profile. When configured properly, Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced Edition provides extremely fast user logons and logoffs when compared to standard roaming profiles. This method also allows the simultaneous usage of Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003/2008 Terminal Services remote desktops in one environment; user-specific settings work cross-platform if Immidio Flex Profiles is used.

If compared to competitors, Immidio Flex Profiles has several advantages or unique selling points:

1. Low complexity with respect to the base concept of running FlexEngine as a command-line program and avoiding massive backend infrastructure. (no database server or web server required)
2. Superior granularity when handling application-specific segments of the user profile, easily configurable through individual INI files. (profile segmentation)
3. Low footprint of user profile data when looking at required disk space capacity and network bandwidth.
4. Intuitive graphical management console and application setting import wizard based on Microsoft Sysinternals ProcMon log files, reducing the effort to create Flex Profiles INI files significantly.
5. Enterprise-ready centralized management through Active Directory Group Policies.

Immidio Flex Profiles’ method of dividing user profiles into multiple segments decouples different personal configuration sets, with some of these configuration sets related to applications and others to individual groups of workspace settings.  As an example, Immidio Flex Profiles can make individual settings of Microsoft Word completely independent of a user’s preferred mouse settings – an obvious user requirement that is not available out of the box. 

In addition to that, profile segmentation allows for smooth migration and cross-platform scenarios where only selected application settings roam with a user while general workspace settings may be platform-specific.  Selected workspace settings, such as keyboard, mouse, Internet Explorer, certificates, screensavers and Windows Explorer, can be managed through dedicated product functionalities.  Combined with its minimal installation and backend footprint, Immidio Flex Profiles is ideal for today’s user requirements in modern virtualized Windows environments.