I was talking with Stephen Rose, the owner of this blog, and he was saying that one of the top pain points that he hears from you frequently is transferring the user profiles when migrating from XP to Win7. In today’s blog post we are going to touch on Microsoft and its partner’s offerings that we feel will help solve that pain point.
This week, Karri Alexion-Tiernan posted a blog on the Windows For Your Business blog about the value of using App-V.For those not familiar, App-V is Microsoft’s flagship Application virtualization solution that enables you (IT pros) to deploy applications based on user’s identity and role, providing a more efficient way to deliver and mange applications centrally. Product Manager AJ Smith talked about User State Virtualization (USV) in his blog; how Microsoft’s USV technologies like Folder Redirection and Roaming Profiles empower you to provide users a consistent windows experience across multiple desktops and laptops, by separating user’s data and settings from the physical device and replicating it centrally.
One of Microsoft Premium partners Appsense provides user virtualization solutions that extends Microsoft’s USV offering by providing additional capabilities that’s helps in migration of XP profiles to Windows 7 profiles by seamlessly combining the two into a single version, thus accelerating Win 7 deployment in your organization. It can also abstracts both user’s desktop personalization and application settings, providing a consistent application experience across physical AND virtual applications. For additional info on Appsense, visit their website.
You can complement the benefits of both App-V and USV by deploying them together so that users can be provisioned both their applications and data on demand from multiple devices, thus reducing the dependency on one piece of hardware. In this blog we will go a level deeper and talk about what you should consider when implementing App-V with Appsense user virtualization. To get an overview – you can also watch this webinar from Appsense on App-V integration. Enough said on the value – let’s get into the technology piece!
I caught up with two Microsoft’s MVPs – Alaa Ajweh and Tim Mangan who shared some guidance and best practices on deploying App-V with Appsense to support user profile virtualization on Windows 7, so let’s hear in their own words!