Integrating Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced with Microsoft App-V

  • Article

image I have been working in Amsterdam this week and assisting a number of customers! its been great fun as i have had the pleasure of Madelinde Walraven shadowing me on my adventures.

Well to add to my fun week I met up with a couple of our App-V MVPs, Rodney Medina and Ment van der Plas for dinner. We had a great chat, and good laugh at a few things. Rodney and Ment also told me about some of the things there Flex Profile Kit has been extended to do including a way to save specific elements from an App-V app settings into flex.

Rodney then went on to say how he blogged about it today… and in his own words…

“Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced is a Windows Profile Management solution which solves a lot of Windows Profile Management issues and optimizes the overall user experience of Windows Profiles.

This is achieved by decoupling and segmenting personal application settings from the underlying Windows OS and Profile, making these settings available cross-Windows Platform and creating a consistent user experience no matter what Windows OS the user is working on.

While this way of handling Windows User Profiles provides a lot of benefits in a scenario where applications are installed traditionally (i.e. no virtualization), it can also be used to decouple personal application settings from App-V enabled (sequenced) applications.

What are the benefits?

  • Decouple personal application settings from App-V Delta files (.PKG) proprietary format.

Using App-V there is practically no control over what gets stored into the user delta (.PKG), which in some cases can grow extensively. With Flex Profiles Advanced you can explicitly configure what application settings need to be restored and saved at application startup and shutdown, making you independent of the .PKG files. With Flex Profiles Advanced application settings are stored in an open format (.ZIP).

  • Migrate user application settings from installed instance to virtual instance.

When moving from traditional installations (e.g. MSI) to App-V enabled (sequenced) applications, users lose their personal application settings for those applications because these settings are stored in the “real” registry of their Windows User Profile. When using Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced in such a transition scenario, it is possible to migrate settings you specify to the App-V enabled applications.

This even works in a scenario where you now run Windows XP with MSI installations and you are migrating to Windows 7 with App-V enabled applications!

  • One transparent way to administrate all user/application settings.

This is especially a good way to manage user settings for scenarios where different deployment solutions are being used and users work on different Windows platforms. For example when users are connecting to remote desktops on TS or VDI and are also working on traditional desktops. With Flex Profiles Advanced it is also possible to manage user settings for both virtual and installed applications in the same way.”

To read more click here

I will have to give the trial software a try and set this up and let you know my findings. But its certainly an interested concept in a way you could create a mandatory profile for your users whilst keeping certain customizations across locally installed applications and virtualized applications.

As always this is not a Microsoft Applications and its is not supported or tested with our Product teams.