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.

At Immidio we aim at providing point solutions at commodity prices, because we want our products to be affordable for everyone.

Over the past two years we have noticed the need to offer our licenses not only for sale, but also provide our customers with the option to lease or rent Immidio licenses.

Together with the launch of Immidio Flex Profiles 7.5 on the 28^th of September 2011, Immidio introduces two new licensing models next to the traditional purchase agreement.

Immidio will start offering an Enterprise Agreement, where customers can purchase licenses and spread the payment over a three year period.  Next to that, Immidio will introduce the Enterprise Subscription Agreement which offers the possibility to rent the Immidio licenses for a period of three years.

With these new licensing models we drastically lower the initial investment for our products and also provide more flexibility with regard to intermediate change to another licensing model, early termination, increasing the number of licenses while benefitting from the original discount or decreasing the number of licenses without any fines. Also payment frequency will be flexible and possible by month, quarter or year.

Immidio’s products should be present in any modern Windows IT infrastructure. Adjusting our licensing model to the needs of our customers and prospects is an important step in reaching that objective.

To discuss the options for your specific situation, please contact sales@immidio.com

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.

Immidio has released AppScriber 3, a new version of our enterprise app store. Besides adding many small improvements, the Enterprise edition has been extended with some major new features, in close cooperation with our customers:

• Customizable user interface, to align with corporate look and feel
• More extensive workflow (2-level), where you can select users or groups to perform a first approval step of application requests, which — when approved — will then need an additional approval by a second layer of selected users or groups. Workflow settings are configurable per application.
• More granular control over who sees so-called General applications, to only allow certain groups of users to activate applications without approval.
• Additional item types, to enable self-servicing for other types of resources, besides applications, which are controlled by Active Directory security groups, like printers or shares.

According to feedback we have received from our customer base, the new features added to our product make Immidio AppScriber 3 a complete enterprise app store for corporate Windows infrastructures.

Immidio now also offers AppScriber 3 Express, a free edition without any user limits or time limits. The following features are not available in the Express edition:

• User interface customization
• Managed applications
• Additional item types
• Security group filtering on general applications

If you start using the Express edition and want to unlock all features of Immidio AppScriber 3, you only need to install a valid Enterprise edition license file.

Feel free to give Immidio AppScriber 3 a try. After registering on the Immidio website, you can download the Immidio AppScriber 3 installation package and get a free 30-day trial license for the fully functional Enterprise edition or a full license for the Express edition.

Click here to watch the AppScriber 3 Enterprise introduction video.

In 2010 Immidio evolved from a start-up company to a global enterprise software vendor. With over 350.000 licenses sold this year and acquiring over 140 customers in more than 20 countries, we can look back at 2010 as a real breakthrough. Immidio has become an important player in the Microsoft application infrastructure market, delivering point solutions that bring ROI within the first year. Immidio offers best-of-breed solutions to specific problems at commodity prices, making buying decisions a no-brainer.

We are very proud to see that several Fortune 100 companies have chosen Immidio’s products to help them migrate to Windows 7. Some of them have purchased our newest product Immidio AppScriber, an application self-provisioning environment that provides the freedom to users to activate or deactivate applications 24/7 without IT administrator intervention.

Becoming a global software vendor also brings change within the organization. Dr. Bernhard Tritsch – our highly valued and appreciated CTO – has decided to leave Immidio to make room for Rodney Medina to become Immidio’s Chief Technology Officer. Rodney has been the driving force behind turning the Flex Profiles freeware product into Immidio Flex Profiles 7 and is the inventor of Immidio AppScriber. Please join me in congratulating Rodney with his new position. I am confident that he will continue to extend Immidio’s roadmap with relevant functionality and new products.

The growth of our company also requires a larger office. Immidio will be moving office to a new location at the Burgemeester Stramanweg 101, Amsterdam – a beautiful location, easily reached by car and public transport. We will be moving to our new office on Friday, January 14, 2011.

2010 was a great year, and we are ready to meet the new demands of 2011. We are looking forward to working with you to make it a success.

The Immidio team wishes you a Happy New Year!

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).