Since the release of Flex Profiles 7.5 last September, Immidio’s technical team has dedicated all its time to develop the next logical step: Immidio Flex+.

Immidio Flex+ is the drastically improved successor of Flex Profiles, designed in close collaboration with our ever-growing installed base. Immidio Flex+ is not only about profile management anymore; it has evolved to a mature User Environment Management solution, comparable to other UEM solutions, at only a fraction of the cost.

The upcoming release of Immidio Flex+ is a major milestone in the 10-year history of Flex Profiles. Starting as a freeware user profile management solution — touching millions of users around the world — it has now become a full User Environment Management solution.

In addition to enhanced user profile management, Immidio Flex+ offers:

• User Environment Management features like mapping network drives and printers, managing shortcuts and file type associations, setting environment variables and much more
• Condition-based targeting to control when to apply certain configurations and define “workspaces” for easy administration
• Application State Management to configure the initial state of an application and optionally reset it to a predefined state every time it is started
• Migration of application personalization, not only from one OS to another, but between application versions!

Last week our CTO Rodney Medina presented a sneak preview of Flex+ in a webinar for a limited number of invitees. If you would like to view the recording of this webinar please send us an email.

From June 26 to June 29, Immidio will be present at Microsoft TechEd in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (booth #87). This is an excellent opportunity for you to meet face-to-face and get your personal demo of Flex+.

Immidio Flex+ will be available in Q3. Stay tuned for more detailed information about Immidio Flex+ in the weeks to come. We are about to surprise you!

We recently announced the upcoming availability of Immidio Application Profiler and today is the day. You can now start using Application Profiler when implementing Immidio Flex Profiles.

Application Profiler is licensed as an Immidio Flex Profiles 7.5 component and is available for download at the Immidio website. An introductory video about Application Profiler is available on Immidio’s YouTube channel.

Since its introduction, the only labor-intensive task remaining when implementing Immidio Flex Profiles was the creation of Flex Config files. The Flex Profiles Assistant (introduced in Flex Profiles 7.0) made this more convenient, but a lot of manual activities remained.

With the new Immidio Application Profiler this task has been drastically simplified: just run your application from the user-friendly graphical interface and Application Profiler automatically analyzes where it stores its file and registry configuration. The analysis results in an optimized Flex Config file, which can then be edited in the Application Profiler or used as-is in the Flex Profiles environment.

Another task that has become much easier is the creation of application-specific Predefined Settings, which allow you to set the initial configuration state of applications. Simply use the Application Profiler to analyze the application and configure it exactly to your liking before closing it. Save the Flex Config file with Predefined Settings to export the current application configuration state.

Everything we do at Immidio is done in close cooperation with our customers and partners. We talk to customers on a daily basis about what they need and we look for the common denominator so everyone can benefit. That’s how and why we created DirectFlex, Predefined Settings and Process Criteria in Flex Profiles 7.5. The release of Immidio Application Profiler is the latest example of this approach.

Immidio Application Profiler is licensed as an Immidio Flex Profiles 7.5 component and will be publicly available in January 2012.

An introduction video about Immidio Application Profiler is available on Immidio’s Youtube channel.

On 28th September 2011, Immidio will release version 7.5 of its flagship product, Flex Profiles. Immidio Flex Profiles 7.5 introduces a variety of new and enhanced functionality that improves logon times even further, allows pre-populating the user environment and simplifies the administration of advanced infrastructure scenarios by removing the need for scripting.

Instant application-level profile management with DirectFlex

With the release of Flex Profiles 7, Immidio introduced DirectFlex, an optional mechanism to manage user settings at application launch and application shutdown, improving logon and logoff times dramatically. With the release of Flex Profiles 7.5 this functionality has evolved, simplifying administration and improving the user experience.

Flex Profiles 7.5 is able to automatically detect application launch and exit for applications configured for use with DirectFlex. Using this mechanism Flex Profiles is capable of managing any application’s settings on the fly, regardless of how the application is launched.

In order to enable DirectFlex for an application, you can simply select the application’s executable(s) in the Flex Profiles Management Console. This means the administration of DirectFlex is performed centrally and requires no particular configuration on the client devices.

DirectFlex can be enabled per application and is especially useful for applications with a lot of personalized configuration data, which slows down the logon and logoff process.

Another scenario where DirectFlex is useful is when users use the same set of applications from a variety of platforms, for example running applications locally and in a remote VDI environment. Since DirectFlex stores the settings directly when the application is closed, the user can immediately start the application in another Windows session without first having to logoff and logon again.

Dynamic personalization through Predefined Settings

Predefined Settings enables you to pre-populate user settings for any application or Windows setting. In Flex Profiles 7.5 this functionality has been extended to conveniently create and edit Predefined Settings while allowing more advanced customization.

This feature can be used to pre-populate the user environment, like placing a desktop shortcut, creating an application configuration file or setting a registry value. For more advanced scenarios it is possible to use placeholders to insert dynamic information from user and/or computer environment variables.

Predefined Settings allow customizing the user environment without being dependent on complex scripting. In addition, Predefined Settings are managed centrally from the Flex Profiles Management Console.

Advanced Process Criteria

Flex Profiles 7.5 introduces advanced Process Criteria that allow more granular control over which Flex Configuration files are processed and how, based on user and computer attributes.

The following Process Criteria are available:

•             Environment Variable – Check if specified variable exists or has specific value

•             Exit Code – Check exit code of specified command

•             File Version – Check file or product version of specified file

•             Operating System – Check operating system and/or architecture

•             Path – Check if specified path exists

•             Registry Key – Check if specified registry key exists

•             Registry Value – Check if specified registry value exists or contains specific data

Depending on the result of the check, you can control what Flex Profiles action should be performed: both import and export, import only, export only or nothing.

End-user self-service

With Flex Profiles Self-Support, end-users can manage their application settings by themselves, without administrator intervention. For every application that is managed by Immidio Flex Profiles, settings can be reset to defaults or restored from a backup.

Application Templates and common settings

Immidio Flex Profiles provides out-of-the-box Application Templates and updated common settings that include all necessary information for configuring the management of common user desktop settings and a variety of applications via a single mouse click.

With the release of Immidio Flex Profiles 7.5 the common settings have been extended with Active Setup (installed components) and DPI settings for Windows 7. Also, some of the Application Templates and common settings definitions have been updated.

Extended silo support

In addition to the existing silo support, Flex Profiles 7.5 also has the ability to process Flex config files from both the General path and a silo-specific path. This allows you to share common Flex config files across multiple silos, while also supporting separate sets of Flex config files depending on which silo you log on to.

Summary

At Immidio, we are truly excited about the upcoming release of Flex Profiles 7.5 that goes far beyond the scope of traditional profile management. With all this new and enhanced functionality we are setting a new standard in Windows profile management.

We are happy to announce the release of Immidio Flex Profiles Self-Support, a free add-on to Flex Profiles 7.

Resetting or restoring settings for specific applications has always been possible, but this was manual work for a system administrator or support personnel. With Immidio Flex Profiles Self-Support, your users can now do this themselves without intervention of the IT department. Using the Immidio Flex Profiles Self-Support functionality within your organization decreases overhead for the IT department and makes users less dependent on support staff.

Immidio Flex Profiles Self-Support is a free component which can only be used in conjunction with Immidio Flex Profiles 7. The user interface is available in English, German and Dutch.

For more information and download, visit http://immidio.com/flexprofiles/self-support/.

Are your users complaining about long logon times?
Do you have many profile-related support calls?

There is a realistic chance that your users are suffering from typical Windows user profile issues. When an organization replaces or uninstalls an application, the regular software distribution products are very capable of cleanly removing the software. However, the user settings and related user data are not removed. Also, users tend to store a lot of data in desktop folders, and play (and save) internet games during their breaks and all this data is stored in their user profile. All of this results in what is known as “profile bloat”. Due to the uncontrolled growth of the profile over the years, there is a large amount of data that needs to be loaded when a user logs on. In today’s IT landscape, this happens multiple times per day as users log on to desktops, connect to virtual applications, or connect to virtual desktops. Every time, the full user profile is loaded.

With the Immidio Flex Profiles Profile Cleanup feature, you can reduce the size of the user profile and immediately improve the logon and logoff times for your end-users. The process is quite simple: as soon as Flex Profiles 7 is implemented, you can create the so-called Flex configuration files from the Flex Profiles Management Console. On the Profile Cleanup tab of the Management Console, you can specify folders, files and registry information which you want to be deleted when users log off, before the roaming profile is written back to the central fileserver.

Here are some examples of what you can achieve when using the Profile Cleanup feature in a VDI, Terminal Services or traditional desktop environment in which you are using roaming user profiles:

Get rid of non-essential profile content
Prevent unnecessary profile growth by deleting specific non-essential user profile content when users log off, like content that internet games or unmanaged applications store in the user profile.

• Improve the logon and logoff speed of user sessions
• Improve end-user experience
• Increase end-user productivity

Remove user profile content for decommissioned applications
While many software distribution systems can uninstall applications that need to be taken out of production, there is not really a way of removing the content those applications have stored in the user profiles. When using the Flex Profiles 7 Profile Cleanup feature you can get rid of all the configuration content that was stored by these applications in the users’ profiles.

Completely decouple personal settings from the user profile
As soon as you start managing personal settings with Flex Profiles by using the import/export functionality, these settings are stored in Flex Profiles profile archives outside the traditional user profile. When using roaming profiles in conjunction with Flex Profiles, it is possible to remove the personal settings you manage with Flex Profiles from the roaming user profile at logoff, since these settings are retained in the Flex Profiles profile archives.

• Start truly managing user profiles, optimizing the existing roaming profiles step-by-step. No big bang implementation of profile management required.
• Improve the logon and logoff speed of user sessions
• Less storage required
• Improve end-user experience and increase end-user productivity

Summary
Immidio Flex Profiles is a powerful point solution to support your Windows User Profile Management. In most cases you can achieve return on investment within 1 year, due to the savings that can be achieved when you implement a full Profile Management solution.

Please download a free 30-day trial.

You are an IT professional and you want to learn about the general concepts behind Windows user profile management before introducing Immidio Flex Profiles to your corporate IT environment?  Immidio provides a technical whitepaper that helps you with this.

Why are Windows user profiles so critically important for corporate IT environments? User profiles are about individual workspaces, each one reflecting its owner’s personality. They may well include business critical information represented by unique, user-specific data and settings related to desktops and applications.  In the past, when users only needed to deal with one physical desktop and one profile, things were relatively simple.  But now they tend to have access to corporate and private applications through multiple physical desktops.  In addition to that, remote desktops and the advent of virtual desktop infrastructures are making things even more challenging.  Using a wider spectrum of applications running on multiple desktops, with each desktop optimized for dedicated tasks, is the way users will be working in the near future.

But how can you manage user profiles efficiently in multi-desktop environments with different Windows versions, such as Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008?  If you always wanted to have a profound answer to this question, this whitepaper is for you.  Be prepared to get some technical insights that go beyond what Microsoft calls User State Virtualization.  The successful management of user profiles turns out to be of growing relevance, both for physical and virtual Windows desktop infrastructures.  In this whitepaper you can read how it’s done.

To learn more and download the Immidio whitepaper, please visit: http://immidio.com/SupportFiles/Windows-Profile-Management-v2.pdf

Earlier this month, the German IT magazine IT-Administrator published an extensive test of Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced Edition. Sandro Lucifora, who performed the tests, states “Considering the positive license and price policy and the many possibilities, Flex Profiles should not be absent in any environment.”
“Because Immidio Flex Profiles supports user profiles across multiple Windows versions, like XP, Vista and 7, it is not only a user profile management solution, but also saves the administrator a lot of effort migrating to new Windows OS versions”, says Lucifora.

Download the full “Profiling für Fortgeschrittene” article (PDF, in German).

Interviews with CIOs, IT professionals and consultants show that user profile compatibility is among the most critical aspects in Windows 7 migration projects. Unfortunately, Windows XP stores user profiles in a different way than Windows 7. This may have some impact on centrally stored personal desktop and application settings in corporate IT environments. Immidio published a whitepaper describing how Flex Profiles uses profile segmentation that ideally suited to making user profiles cross-platform compatible. This whitepaper is particularly targeted at Windows XP to Windows 7 migration projects and at side-by-side scenarios using multiple versions of Windows simultaneously.

Immidio Flex Profiles is today’s most popular profile management product implementing profile segmentation separating and decoupling sets of application and desktop settings. Segmented profiles work on all Windows versions that are officially supported by Microsoft, both 32 bit and 64 bit. The general idea behind this concept is using a pre-configured base profile (e.g. default, local or mandatory profile) for common base settings and store individual system or application settings in associated individual files or archives.

To learn more and to download the whitepaper, please visit: http://immidio.com/SupportFiles/Win7-Migration-with-Immidio-Flex-Profiles.pdf.

There are many aspects that come to mind when migrating to Windows 7 in any environment. How to deploy the new operating system, re-package or virtualize applications, how to deploy those applications, etcetera.

What we’ve seen quite a lot in the past, when people were migrating to Windows XP, is that the migration of the users’ application settings was not considered. This resulted in several unpleasant experiences.

1. After migration the helpdesk gets overloaded with issues related to application settings. This also quite often created a bad image of the IT department.
2. After migration there is no way back and it restricts users to roam outside the locations that are migrated to the new OS (without a notebook). Because once you have logged onto the new OS, it’s better not to roam and log on to the old OS anymore.
3. Because of issue 2, many companies were forced to do a “big bang” migration, where all desktops were upgraded in a very short period of time, which resulted in even more focus on issue 1.

Many customers don’t want to go through this again and are looking for another way to get through this phase. With Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced we introduce a solution which helps you with a smoother transition to Windows 7 on the level of user experience and provide substantial benefit on managing Windows profiles after the migration as well.

Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced is a Windows Profile Management solution which solves a lot of issues and optimizes the overall user experience. This is achieved by decoupling and segmenting personal application settings from the underlying Windows OS and profile, making these settings available cross-Windows platform and creating a consistent user experience no matter what Windows OS the user is working on.

The approach for the Windows XP to Windows 7 migration is pretty straightforward and consists of the following steps.

Implement Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced in your current Windows XP environment.

1. Install the FlexEngine (tiny MSI) on each endpoint.
2. Configure the FlexEngine through Active Directory Group Policy with help of the provided ADM template.
3. Make sure the FlexEngine runs at Logon and Logoff for all users. (e.g. Logon and Logoff scripts).
4. Use the Flex Profiles Management Console to create application-specific configuration files for the application settings you want to “decouple” from the Windows Profile.

From this point on, the application settings you configured will be stored outside the Windows profile once a user logs off, on a location you configured (e.g. homedrive). Let users work in this situation for such a period of time that you are sure that all the configured application settings are “decoupled” for all users.

Implement Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced in your new Windows 7 environment.

What you need to do to implement Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced in the new environment is very dependent on the total migration scenario (like AD migration). But what we at least require is that you use the same location where you have stored the “decoupled” user settings. In each migration scenario, you at least need to install the FlexEngine on each Windows 7 device.

You can now deploy Windows 7 and applications using the deployment solution(s) you have in place at the pace you want to without migrating the “traditional” Windows profile. Once a user logs on to a Windows 7 desktop the FlexEngine will load all the personal application settings that were created by the FlexEngine in the Windows XP environment.

In the Windows 7 environment you could even decide to use a mandatory profile for all or specific users to get optimal logon and logoff times. Then you can decide which application settings users can modify and save by using the Flex Profiles Management Console.

The result

First, a smooth transition to Windows 7 while maintaining personal application settings. Second, take control of Windows profiles on Windows 7 from that point on. And third, you have just created a Windows XP and Windows 7 side-by-side desktop environment. Meaning users can now switch between these two OS’es with a consistent user experience, since the application settings that you decided on can now be roamed cross-platform.

This all results in much less overload on the helpdesk after migration, users can roam outside the locations that have been migrated and no (technical) pressure on a big bang migration!