Flex Profiles 7.5 Announced, Packs New Features

On 28th September 2011, Immidio will release version 7.5 of its flagship product, Flex Profiles. These are the new features.

Instant application-level profile management with DirectFlex

With the release of Flex Profiles 7, Immidio introduced DirectFlex, an optional mechanism to manage user settings at application launch and application shutdown, improving logon and logoff times dramatically. With the release of Flex Profiles 7.5 this functionality has evolved, simplifying administration and improving the user experience.

Flex Profiles 7.5 is able to automatically detect application launch and exit for applications configured for use with DirectFlex. Using this mechanism Flex Profiles is capable of managing any application’s settings on the fly, regardless of how the application is launched.

In order to enable DirectFlex for an application, you can simply select the application’s executable(s) in the Flex Profiles Management Console. This means the administration of DirectFlex is performed centrally and requires no particular configuration on the client devices.

DirectFlex can be enabled per application and is especially useful for applications with a lot of personalized configuration data, which slows down the logon and logoff process.

Another scenario where DirectFlex is useful is when users use the same set of applications from a variety of platforms, for example running applications locally and in a remote VDI environment. Since DirectFlex stores the settings directly when the application is closed, the user can immediately start the application in another Windows session without first having to logoff and logon again.

Dynamic personalization through Predefined Settings

Predefined Settings enables you to pre-populate user settings for any application or Windows setting. In Flex Profiles 7.5 this functionality has been extended to conveniently create and edit Predefined Settings while allowing more advanced customization.

This feature can be used to pre-populate the user environment, like placing a desktop shortcut, creating an application configuration file or setting a registry value. For more advanced scenarios it is possible to use placeholders to insert dynamic information from user and/or computer environment variables.

Predefined Settings allow customizing the user environment without being dependent on complex scripting. In addition, Predefined Settings are managed centrally from the Flex Profiles Management Console.

Advanced Process Criteria

Flex Profiles 7.5 introduces advanced Process Criteria that allow more granular control over which Flex Configuration files are processed and how, based on user and computer attributes.

The following Process Criteria are available:

•             Environment Variable – Check if specified variable exists or has specific value

•             Exit Code – Check exit code of specified command

•             File Version – Check file or product version of specified file

•             Operating System – Check operating system and/or architecture

•             Path – Check if specified path exists

•             Registry Key – Check if specified registry key exists

•             Registry Value – Check if specified registry value exists or contains specific data

Depending on the result of the check, you can control what Flex Profiles action should be performed: both import and export, import only, export only or nothing.

End-user self-service

With Flex Profiles Self-Support, end-users can manage their application settings by themselves, without administrator intervention. For every application that is managed by Immidio Flex Profiles, settings can be reset to defaults or restored from a backup.

Application Templates and common settings

Immidio Flex Profiles provides out-of-the-box Application Templates and updated common settings that include all necessary information for configuring the management of common user desktop settings and a variety of applications via a single mouse click.

With the release of Immidio Flex Profiles 7.5 the common settings have been extended with Active Setup (installed components) and DPI settings for Windows 7. Also, some of the Application Templates and common settings definitions have been updated.

Extended silo support

In addition to the existing silo support, Flex Profiles 7.5 also has the ability to process Flex config files from both the General path and a silo-specific path. This allows you to share common Flex config files across multiple silos, while also supporting separate sets of Flex config files depending on which silo you log on to.

 

Source: http://blog.immidio.com/2011/09/15/flex-profiles-7-5-transcends-traditional-profile-management/

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