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[JLamers]

Hi All,

We consider new management software for our Citrix environment and we looked for RES PowerFuse and AppSense version 8.

Both products have a different policy about what to do and what not.

PowerFuse is easier to manage, but in a demonstration of AppSense I saw 2 options calles ROLLBACK and LOCKDOWN which were very cool and useful.

I asked RES for building similar options into PowerFuse and they said they never got any questions like this for new features.

Let me explain them and see if you share my thoughts that these features would make PowerFuse even better than it is.

ROLLBACK is a feature that when an application doesn't work anymore, you can rollback to a backup of your settings, in this way you don't throw away all your settings, but just the settings which you changed since the last backup (which is at midnight).

LOCKDOWN is a utility to disable several options in a program. No GPO's or registry settings to disable menu functions, just click the options you want to get outgreyed and there you are, your application locked down just as you like it!!!


Let me know what you think about these features and if you think they are useful (and make a feature request to RES  )

[Yuri]

As I'm a little unknown with the Appsense solution to be honost I hope you can elaborate more on the subject? I'd love to know more although I must admit I've seen the stuff in demo and it did seem impressive. Funny thing is that PowerFuse's got its foot down in the Benelux where Appsense tends to dominate the UK. Marketing will probably dictate the products will address different needs, but that holds no value to an engineer and adding cool and useful technology to a product based on a market pull principle is generally not a bad idea.

I'm guessing Rollback shouldn't be too hard to realise as they allready keep track of modifications using audit trailing. If you treat every REM object and associated changes kinda like a leaf object that is being represented by a GUID in the datastore, why not also track the actual change you made in the REM? Kinda like Wisdom's Snapshot Intelligence the other way around?. The funny thing would be to track changes users make I suppose. Instead of storing UPR files I thing keeping track of UPR files would be a much cooler concept.

Lockdown of applications is hard for me personally, as an outsider, to put into RES' perspective. Is this patented techlology? RES provides a framework for workspace management in the form of the PowerFuse product. They have not yet really entered the application lockdown sphere as (I guess) they could state it is pretty much up to the vendors and suppliers to supply the application modification functionality. I can not think of any organization that would not love this funtionlality to make it to the PowerFuse product though! Although you can allready modify application objects using ADM and REG files.

[Swen]

I'm doing a Powerfuse POC for a customer in Belgium for the moment and they asked me the same question about Rollback feature in Appsense if this is available in Powerfuse.

[Airdeca]

Hi,

It's not easy to compare RES PowerFuse and Appsense because they are totally different products with some similarities which could very well be used together. The competition between the two products is mostly a marketing issue. If a company already bought one product there is no budget left to buy the other as well because they seem to operate in the same area. Correct me if I'm wrong because I only saw one demo (the same one Yuri saw) so I don't know all the aspects of Appsense. But the way I see it is that Appsene is merely to build the user's profile and look and feel of the applications while RES PowerFuse is about delivering the right applications to the right users in the right time on the right location. So they operate on different levels which explains that RES PowerFuse has a lot of features Appsense doesn't have and vice versa. As Yuri mentioned the User Preferences feature cover some issues that are also handled by Appsense but in a different way.

[RESguru]

Hi all,
Just my two cents. You can quite easily obtain similar functionality in PowerFuse as you describe in the Rollback feature:

Any settings based on registry, files or tasks can be configured in PowerFuse as PowerLaunch items for Applications. What this means is that you for example can stick a registry setting on an application. This setting will be entered into the registry uppon launch of the app. Cool thing is you can mark it for Run-Once, i.e. the setting becomes voulentary (not sure I spelled that right)

So, how do you roll back then. Easy: In the users designated homedrive, PowerFuse creates .once files for each run-once setting you create. If you delete any of the .once files the respective settings are re-applied.

To make this more snazzy You may create a new app, say - call it "Restore my Outlook to Factory settings". Add some PowerLaunch external tasks to delete the .once files that have to do with MAPI settings, registry, etc dealing with outlook.

This way you will have the ability to give the users a chance to repair their stuff (partially) without having to call support (And there was much rejoycing, yay! ;-)

Hope this helps



 

[a3]

I have seen future feature requests as you described. It is a matter of priority before you will see similar functionality in PF.