Personalize Microsoft Office 2013 with AppSense

I came across this really nice article on "The Cloud Survival Guide" blog talking about personalizing Office 2013 with AppSense. It's nice to have information like this as more of our customers adopt Microsoft's latest and greatest Office release.

Source: http://cloudsurvivalguide.com/?p=466

AppSense Configuration Layering and Change Tracking

With the release of Environment Manager 8 FR4, AppSense has introduced an interesting feature that allows you to split up configuration files into layers that can be managed by different groups. Below is a video demoing the new functionality.

From the video description:

Enabling multiple teams in the enterprise to work on the parts of the configuration they are responsible for. Different layers can be worked on -- perhaps referencing core layers with common configuration components, like re-usable conditions -- and then merged together automatically in the console.

AppSense Management Suite now AppSense DesktopNow

A significant AppSense release has been released today. The product previously known as AppSense Management Suite is now called AppSense DesktopNow. This brings the product in line with the rest of their major products; AppSense DataNow and AppSense MobileNow.

Also, a while back AppSense teased that a future release would implement ongoing updates via patches--that release is finally here! This should greatly simplify the upgrade process.

Here is an excerpt from the site mentioning some of the changes:
"More Flexible, Agile and Granular than ever before; AppSense DesktopNow is a new and updated version of the existing AppSense Management Suite, introducing new features, capabilities and an updated look and feel. DesktopNow will use software patching technology (MSP's) to provide updates in the form of Service Packs and Hotfixes."

For more detailed information, you can refer to the following resources:
DesktopNow Product Page
MyAppSense

Microsoft UE-V 1.0

Microsoft has recently announced a new product, called UE-V (User Experience Virtualization). UE-V is Microsoft's answer to some of the roaming user profiles issues that have plagued virtual environments such as XenApp, Remote Desktop Services, or VDI for years, including slow profile load times, profile bloat, and profile corruption. Similarly to third-party solutions such as AppSense, Microsoft's UE-V decouples the user profile from the operating system, allowing for rollback of user settings and loading user settings on-demand instead of loading all user settings on login. It also reduces profile bloat by giving the administrator more surgical control over the specific registry and files to capture.

Although a version 1.0 product, and it's not as robust as AppSense, it's looking pretty good. Below is an overview video. For more details, go to: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hh943107.aspx