RES Software User Group

PowerFuse AdminGuide released!

May 20th, the RES PowerFuse Administrative guide was released. This massive 312 page document has been in the works for quite a few months. It contains alot of good, solid technical information about how to deploy and configure all the components of RES PowerFuse, including the Desktop Sampler, the Workspace Extender, all sorts of interesting commandlines, registry settings etc.

Here are some of the sections I would like to highlight from the guide:

• Pages 109-128: Here you have a complete reference to all the .ini settings in the pwrmenu.ini file in the users homedirectory.
• Pages 185-195: All the secret sauce on Zero Profile Technology, that is how to use it. (sorry A.S., you’ll have to figure out to do ZPT on your own :-)
• Pages 200-205: Describes the exact order in which things happen inside PowerFuse during login, session refresh and logout. This is valuable information, folks!
• Pages 285-297: Yes! Finaly a complete and official guide to the PowerFuse registry settings. As my old article on RESGuru.com hasn’t been updated for quite a while time, this is definatly a must-read!

The Admin Guide can be downloaded from the RES Software portal using this link. Note that a login is NOT required for this file. For a complete overview of free downloads, visit the download treeview here. This is a bookmark worth saving. All free downloads are marked with this icon: All downloads requiring login with your SA portal account are marked with a padlock icon like this one .

To download other technical documents in the treeview, you’ll want to navigate to Downloads Tree | RES PowerFuse | Technical documentation.

Happy reading!

Bob Janssen on Desktop Tranformation and VDI

Straight off the press: Recently RES Software’s founder and CTO – Mr. Bob Janssen – has written some quite interesting articles for the medias. One article posted over at ZD Net, describe in detail what the Desktop Transformation concept is all about. Another article was posted last month in Network Security magazine, where the topic was VDI and security.

I would urge you to read thease articles, as they give a unique perspective on what RES Software does. As a prospective enduser it may help you understand the value proposition of RES better. As an integrator you are likely to find many good talkingpoints within these articles.

The Desktop Transformation article on ZDnet can be found here.

The article regarding VDI and security can be found here (note you need to purchase the article online. Last time I looked, it was £31.50, but it’s well worth it.)

RES Software Wallpapers

From the Van Gogh dept. Recently the friendly folks at RES Marketing created a set of nice wallpapers for everybody to use.  I personally like ‘em as they’re nice, clean and simple – and it tells you what RES Software does too! :) Anyhow, I’ve put these into my training VM’s so there’s something relevant on the desktop. There are two wallpapers included, for regular 1024×768 and for widescreen aspect ratios, there’s one in 1920×1080. Below is a preview of what they look like:

Click here to download a .zip file with both wallpapers as .BMP and .PNG: 

Remember, if you want to use these as a wallpaper for PowerFuse controlled sessions, use the .BMP files for best results. Upload them in the Composition|Desktop|Background node. I will soon write an article on how to chose the right wallpaper file, depending on the client screen resolution.

Finally, if you have made your own homebrew RES related wallpapers and you would like to share them, please  post them on one of the picture hosting sites, such as Image Shack etc and drop a comment here or in the forum.

New RES Software Customer Portal?!

After just visiting the RES Software support portal this afternoon, and revisiting just now,  I couldn’t help noticing that some major changes have been made!

Public searches, downloads, knowledgebase and remote assistance seem te have been made publically available. It would seem they’ve opened up support for the masses. Quite the schmoove move as this will help investigators of RES Software’s products extensively!

Check it out here.

Wisdom-Fu! Find dumpfiles and alert by email.

From the community hero dept. I just got a LinkedIn update on a new cool article, written by Alain Assaf over at the CDC. He’s created a recipe on how to create a Wisdom module which will look for windows dump files, collect them centrally and report back to you by email. Pretty darn nifty if you ask me!

You can read the full article here:  Wisdom-Fu: Email alert when you find a memory dump. There is also a forum thread about this. Wisdom-Fu…  Gotta love it! :-) Keep up the great work Alain!

Click here to download the buildingblock:

3 New Technotes!

A set of 3 new technotes have been published this week, which will help you get more out of PowerFuse. We’ve got a Win7 migration article in the works too, so stay tuned! Here is an overview of the articles, available in the Technote Library.

RG024: Secrets of PWRGATE.EXE (Added March 5th 2010). This document will show some of the less know things you can use the pwrgate.exe process in PowerFuse 2010 to accomplish. For example you can launch the User Installed Applications (PMWS) wizard directly with this tool, and much more. A buildingblock is included for your convenience.

RG023: Managing multiple config sets for one app: (Added March 2nd 2010). Here we will examine how you can have multiple sets of configuration settings all stored under one application, enabeling the users to select which to apply when they  start the app. Very usefull for prod/test/dev scenarios. We will also examine the new Registry Tracing feature of PowerFuse 2010 in the same article.

RG022: PRINTERS.LST – The forgotten feature: (Added March 2nd 2010). This is the first article since the release of Powerfuse 2010. From this article you can learn how to create lists of printers which better reflect the geography and physical world, where the printers reside.