AppSense to Provide More Control over Desktop Environments

How to Spring Clean Tech Profiles for Better Organization Management

Faced with trying to manage hundreds, possibly even thousands, of upgrades across not only multiple versions of Windows, but also a variety of other platforms, most IT organizations are trying to figure out how to impose a little order on what is often an inherently chaotic process.

To help address that issue, AppSense at the Citrix Synergy 2015 conference this week previewed a forthcoming upgrade of its AppSense DesktopNow user environment management software that Jed Ayres, senior vice president of marketing for AppSense, says will not only include a streamlined user interface, but also a unification of the agents that need to be deployed and an ability to store desktop configurations in the cloud.

It is designed primarily to enable IT organizations to separate user profiles from the underlying platform. Ayres says that as the complexity of the desktop computing environment has increased, IT administrators are looking for more efficient ways to handle desktop migrations at scale.

To that end, AppSense this week also officially unveiled a variety of enhancements that are specific to Citrix virtual desktop environments, including tighter integration with Citrix application programming interfaces (APIs), the ability to detect Citrix vDisk instances, and more granular control over browsers and application windows.

Managing desktop computing environments in any organization is often a thankless task. The challenge is that as the desktop computing environment has become more diverse, IT administrators find themselves managing physical and virtual desktops running on both PCs and any number of mobile computing devices. One way to minimize that chaos, however, is to start separating the personalities of the people who use those systems from the underlying platform in a way that allows the applications and preferences associated with any user to be moved at any time required.