Optimizing AppSense Environment Manager configuration response times

The various Conditions that you specify within your AppSense EM configurations take different amounts of time to process. To maintain the optimal time for processing of configurations, it is important to know the relevant speeds that each Condition is processed at. Once you are aware of these speeds, you can then streamline your configurations to ensure the best possible performance. As an example, if a configuration contains OR Conditions, you can group them in order of response time with the quickest evaluating first. If the first Condition matches, the configuration is not held up by the slower response time of the second Condition.

Application Manager Self-Elevation of Start Menu Pinned Items

When you are using the Self-Elevation feature of AppSense Application Manager - kind of like a "break glass" function for users who may need to run applications that would otherwise be blocked - you access it using a context menu item. However, if users right-click on their Start Menu Pinned Items, the option to Self-Elevate does not appear.

I don't know what happens behind-the-scenes to cause this but here's a quick workaround - use the Shift key whilst right-clicking and you'll get the expected set of options. Remembered that trick from back in the early XP days when you had to use Shift with right-click just to get the Open With option.

I must also apologise for being so quiet lately. I've been trying to work on some innovative stuff but I've been somewhat hampered by a storage device failure at home. I spend all day preaching best practices and then just ignore them in my own environment. As I said on Twitter, there's a word for this - idiot. Hopefully I will be back up and running soon.

Using AppSense Application Manager Rules Analyzer

If you're using Application Manager to solve your application execution issues (and lets face it, if you're not, you're missing out on a "set and forget" way to keep your users from causing themselves problems), sometimes you'll need to know why a particular executable is being blocked. Sometimes you may find a misconfigured configuration can cause more problems than it solves, and when this happens, you'll need to become familiar with the Rules Analyzer feature.

Migrating settings from an Application Group to Session Data in AppSense Environment Manager

When you use the Personalization Server feature to save Registry and file settings into Application Groups, each group maintains a separate copy of the Personalization data and cannot communicate using it. For applications like rundll32.exe, which require access to the same Registry keys but cannot be added to Application Groups, you add the keys to Session Data. These keys are automatically excluded from managed applications and use the "real", rather than virtualized, versions as saved and restored by Session Data.

Is AppSense Management Suite a solution simply for larger enterprises?

When I'm trying to extol the virtues of the AppSense Management Suite to peers, I'm often faced with this statement - "it's good for larger enterprises". This perception appears to be based around the current real-world usage of the software and partly also to the way it is portrayed on the AppSense website. To be fair, it's hard to condense what you can do with AppSense into a succinct webpage (with so many different parts and ways to use it, this is a problem not limited to AppSense, in all honesty). It's a suite of software that can often not be about what it is commonly used for or intended to be used for, but more for the innovative ways you can use it yourself to improve your own unique environment. I'm not going to get into the whole "what can you do with it?" debate - that's something for a series of blog posts I've been pulling together for months now - but concentrate more on whether it's correct to say that it's simply for the larger enterprise. In my own humble opinion, I don't think that's a fair statement to make.

Saving additional desktop toolbars in AppSense Environment Manager User Personalization

In most modern versions of Windows (going back to Windows 98 and maybe even Windows 95 with the extra add-ons installed) you can add extra toolbars to your Taskbar, like the Address Bar, Links, maybe even the hated Language Bar. I've never been a fan of these, personally, but working in IT these days is about accommodating the way your users work, not trying to shovel your own way of doing things down their throats :-) Getting additional toolbars to work correctly with the default Environment Manager Personalization configuration requires a very small settings change, however.

Pre-requisites for deploying AppSense agents to an endpoint

When you deploy AppSense agents to an endpoint machine, whether it's from the Management Console directly, via a Deployment Group, or simply by connecting manually from the endpoint to the Management Server website, there are a few pre-requisites you'll need to be aware of for a successful installation.

AppSense Management Suite firewall ports

I just received an email from a peer asking me about the firewall ports that you'd need to open to ensure that AppSense Management Suite was able to work across remote sites. That set me thinking as I'd never read anything that particularly seemed to indicate there was any special configuration required. However, I haven't really done the most complex implementations in the world - most of my clients tend to use XenApp, which means most of the time I am dealing with deploying agents and configurations onto servers that are physically close to my Management Server.