With the AppSense Environment Manager, AppSense streams the virtualized desktop on demand to users when they log in. The end user can personalize the image with specific application settings, access privileges, OS versions and even a preferred desktop background picture, he says. Personalization can also save the unique format or layout settings a user has established for using Excel.
"It’s about a combination of standardizing the Windows desktop to the greatest extent possible for IT to reduce cost and complexity, but at the same time being able to deliver a personalized experience to the user," says Lane. Another driver for the improvements in version 8.1, he adds, is to aid enterprises is adapting to a major change in IT in which workers are becoming more mobile and are bringing personal devices into the workplace, such as tablet computers and smartphones, to do their jobs.
Additional administrative tools include an improved configuration assistant, a debug setup tool and a database migration tool. Performance is improved by enabling parallel processing, which reduces CPU consumption, and by enabling more sophisticated software configuration to boost performance.
AppSense announced version 8.1 at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference held this week in Los Angeles. Although the platform currently supports only Windows environments, Lane says that, down the road, AppSense plans to support other operating systems.
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