Technology Solutions

Scense Live Profiles is a fire and forget solution for user profile management. Workspace and application related user settings are separately and centrally stored but transparently available regardless of the version of the Microsoft Windows operating system and accessible throughout the entire landscape of physical and virtual desktops, laptops, terminal server sessions and unmanaged PC’s. Scense Live Profiles will deliver consistent and familiar behaviour across all types of applications, natively installed, streamed or virtualized, across all desktop types and across all Windows versions.  Scense Live Profiles is also network independent. When Internet is available, Scense Live Profiles is available. By using Scense Live Profiles, the users will always have their applications ready for use and personalized to fit their needs, in real time, wherever they happen to be.

Quick win

Implementing Scense Live Profiles, instantly leads to a consistent user experience. This can be achieved without any preparations, even during a desktop migration process. By reducing the logon times, an increase in user productivity can be established, while the central profile management functionality ensures consistency throughout the desktop environment, inside and outside the corporate network. The ability to restore profile settings to fix desktop or application issues, will result in a decrease in the workload of the IT helpdesk.

Scense’s future ready approach to profile virtualization does not only solve your existing user profile challenges, but also addresses the challenges of tomorrow. Scense Live Profiles delivers:

Short logon times - Scense Live Profiles transforms the users profile into small manageable profile packages that are stored and retrieved just in time: during application start, application stop, logon, logoff or any other moment that is a best fit for that part of the profile: no more profile corruption or last writer win challenges. The flexible profile filters used by Scense Live Profiles will keep the user profile small, reducing IOPS and stress on the server while preventing profile bloat from happening. The amount of profile information is limited to the absolute minimum resulting in short logon times.

Consistent and reliable user experience - Scense Live Profiles uses transparent storage and retrieval of user profiles leading to consistent and reliable application behavior across all application delivery types: virtual, locally installed or streamed, across all Windows platforms: physical or virtual, and across all recent Windows OS versions: 32 and 64 bits. End users using a virtualized application on an unmanaged 32 bit laptop will see the same application behavior when starting the same application locally installed on a corporate 64 bit fat client. To increase the reliability of the user experience even further, Scense’s self-service tooling will help end users to solve profile related application or OS problems themselves by providing roll back functionality.

High availability - Scense Life Profiles is network- and domain independent and operates in offline mode. Scense Live Profiles needs at least an internet connection to be able to retrieve, store and update user profiles centrally. To guarantee a consistent user experience even in disconnected mode, Scense Live Profiles uses a local cache of the user’s profile. To extend the consistency and reliability to all devices, Scense Live profiles also support devices that are not part of the domain: employee owned devices or a home-pc will also show consistency and reliability.

A fire & forget but manageable solution - After installing Scense Live Profiles, the solution will work right away for all devices and all applications: no need to configure filters, read application manuals or other preparations. The management console provides functionality to configure Scense Live Profiles and to address even the badly written applications. All applications and settings are within the span of control of Scense Live Profiles.

Thirty four years ago the first generally available personal computer (called a microcomputer in those days) was released by Apple, the Apple II, and in 1981 IBM brought us the Personal Computer (PC) for business usage. Since then the PC has been a device that has been adopted by the corporate market and the Desktop Computing model has been mainstream for the last three decades. Although many models and technologies exist to manage and control the traditional Desktop Computing model, IT administrators still rely on the traditional software packaging and delivery models created many years ago. MSI Packaging is a well-accepted solution for the daily burdens of software delivery. By packaging a vendor MSI, the application is distributed and configured unattended and conflicts are prevented. MSI Packaging however can be a very expensive and time consuming solution. The technical knowledge and communication needed in the process, resulting in high packaging costs and in application delivery times of months for applications and patches.

Scense’s many years of experience in desktop management, application delivery and MSI packaging, has resulted in the creation of the Adaptive Installer. This will fully eliminate the need for re-packaging and still guarantee a fast, unattended deployment and stable desktops. This functionality enables an on demand and in real-time conflict isolation of conflicting application components during application installation. Adaptive Installer does not need expensive conflict databases or packaging experts and rogue applications will not harm your business application anymore.

Traditional application deployments

involve installing the application onto the OS, including multiple updates to the system registry and local file system, whereby the applications are bound to the specific guest OS. Locally installing applications directly on the OS has many advantages but many applications sharing the same file system, registry and shared components also has a huge risk of conflicts resulting in applications that do not launch or don't work correctly. 

Application Virtualization

involves encapsulating the application within a virtual container, including private registry and file system locations for application access. By separating the applications from the guest operating system, which is technically referred to as "decoupling", applications are not bound to the specific guest OS. The advantages of application virtualization are clear. By virtualizing applications, they become independent of the guest OS.

Many benefits can be achieved with Application Virtualization today like, application conflict resolution, application portability and ease of deployment. One of the main reasons that application virtualization has not been adopted throughout the Enterprises is the fact that not all applications could be virtualized and IT departments still will need to create another mechanism to deliver these non-virtualized applications to the user’s workspace.

With the many years of in-depth experience with all the major application virtualization vendors Scense has implemented an application delivery architecture that will make application virtualization manageable and usable. Scense enables the preparation, configuration, delivery, personalization and manageability of virtualized applications (and physical) without any in-depth technical knowledge. Scense adds context awareness and application to application interoperability with the Application Dependency Control, to the most complex application virtualization technologies. With the standard support for ThinApp from VMware™, App-V from Microsoft™ and Workspace Virtualization from Symantec™, Scense will truly deliver the promise of Application Virtualization.

Migrating to a new Windows platform is not always an easy and straightforward process. The challenges of OS migrations are already well known and the best practices are available, but not feasible for most IT managers. Years of budget cuts prevent IT managers to perform the migrations the proper way and ask for creativity and new ways to plan and execute desktop migrations.The additional extra labor and knowledge needed to perform migration specific tasks is expensive because it is in demand. The room for error and productivity loss is close to zero. A zero sum game that forces IT to look to new ways to address these challenges. The challenges will be alike, but the reasons to migrate to Windows 7 will be unique to each organization. The reason why an organization decides to migrate to Windows 7 will most definitely determine the timescale and the expected quality and costs associated with the migration itself

Scense designed a three step migration process that will help organizations to plan, manage and execute a Windows 7 migration. This process is highly automated and at the same time, offers the levels of control you need. The Scense Migration Toolkit is a low cost solution, which can reduce your migration time significantly but at the same time allows a high end user acceptance and ROI.

Next to the Scense Migration Toolkit, we’ve included additional free Microsoft™ tooling to the process: the Planning and Assessment Toolkit, the Application Compatibility Toolkit, the User State Migration Tool, the Windows Automated Installation Kit and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is an integrated desktop virtualization approach that delivers enterprise-class control and manageability with a familiar user experience. End users get a complete, unmodified virtual desktop that behaves just like a normal PC. There is no change to the applications or desktop environment, no application sharing and no retraining required. Just like with their normal PC’s, users can be allowed to install their own applications, customize their desktop environment and use local printers and USB devices. All of this managed and hosted from a central place within the corporate environment. Migrating to VDI from the traditional Desktop Computing, IT Administrators need to rethink their model from a machine centric to a user centric approach. With Desktop Computing, IT administrators could rely on a fixed desktop location making it easy to attach the right printers and deliver the right software to the end-user. With VDI you just don't know. One of the main advantages of VDI is the introduction of desktop pools. Each pool of desktops is based on one golden template and is available to all users. Because not all users are equal this will in most cases result in multiple templates that need to be defined, managed, patched etcetera, eating up valuable disk space and your valuable time.

Scense has been User Centric from the start and introduces location and pool awareness within VDI environments. With Scense desktops are configured, network drives are mapped, printers are attached and applications are installed based on the user identity, the type of pool and the end user’s location.

Scense will fully eliminate the need for image management. Scense will use one golden template and create desktops based on the related pool automatically. As soon as the user logs on, Scense will further personalize the virtual desktop based on the users’ identity and location, without the intervention of the IT administrator and transparent to the end-user. The amount of templates remains small, the user experience remains high. With the integrated support for VMware™ VDI and support for other vendors like Citrix™ XenDesktop, Scense can deliver the personalized Desktops in your VDI environment.