User Environment Management - The Current Environment

The Current Environment

An IT administrator now has a variety of options when delivering a desktop and applications to a user; personal computer, virtual desktops, terminal servers, application virtualization, application streaming. Typically a combination of these is used to address all the requirements and constraints placed on an organization. Market analysts suggest these technologies are complementary and will exist in tandem, rather than the newest technologies dominating. One growing part of the market is an increase in provisioned and virtualized desktops which can be managed centrally and addresses many of the limitations associated with distributed desktop computing. Several analysts have stated that the future of PC desktops will be heterogeneous (i.e. differing Windows desktop delivery methods will coexist). Key to this is how system administrators design the user experience, the closer the basic look and feel is to how users have previously interacted with their desktops, the more accepting of the new technology they will be. “The nature of pooling or sharing desktops means that each user does not always log on to the same virtual desktop each time they log in and as a result, organizations need to properly plan for this version of musical chairs. It is absolutely critical when using pooled virtual machines (sometimes called dynamic pools) that you have a method of deploying applications and settings to users that is fast, robust and automated.”. It is from this growing requirement that user environment management developed. Critical to the user environment is making sure that user profiles are portable in one manner or another from one session to the next.