From the RES community dept. I was made aware of a cool blog that one of my industry colleagues, Iain Brighton at Virtual Engine, has put together. There are several useful articles regarding RES PowerFuse to be found here, among which I would like to highlight the PowerFuse Delegation article which was published yesterday. Keep up the nice work! Go have a look here.
If you have a blog or website that has solid technical information on RES Software products, drop me a message @RESguru, and I’ll be happy to take a look at it.
From the technote department. One of the oldest articles in the RESguru Technote library has finally received a long deserved overhaul. The article in question, RG005 was first published back in January 2009. The new and improved article is optimized with an index, jumplinks, and organized into 3 main sections:
- Parameters for the RES PowerFuse console
- Installation parameters for the different PowerFuse components
- A mixed hodgepodge of parameters for different sub-components
Click here to read the article
Yesterday August 23rd 2010, RES Software released the anticipated Service Release 2 for RES PowerFuse 2010. The focus of this release is primarily User Settings. Among other things, this release contains User Settings templates for some of the most common applications on the market. More further down.
For OS migration purposes, there is one feature you cannot afford to miss: A new option has been added, called “Capture targeted items once, then track further changes”. Essentially what this option does is to flip the zero profile mode from Specified to Immediate, combined with a run-once flag.
To quote the releasenotes: “By using this mode it becomes very easy to use User Settings to migrate personal settings from one machine to another: With the Capture targeted items on application/session start/end mode it is easy to transfer all stored changes that were made on system A and track all new changes on system B with Track any setting changed by application immediately.”
The other key feature in this release are the User Settings templates. When you edit your managed applications, you now have a pleatora of standard applications for which PowerFuse now includes pre-canned user settings. In order to use them. To find the templates go to the User Settings part of a new managed application and select Targeted Items. When you hit the Add button, you will now see a Templates menu, which includes many standard apps. Below is a complete list of all the included templates and the versions of the applications they support:
- MS Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, Visio, Word, Office Common, Office Tools: Versions 2003, 2007 and 2010
- MS Frontpage 2003
- MS Groove 2007
- MS InfoPath: Versions 2003, 2007, Designer 2010, Filler 2010
- MS OneNote: 2007 and 2010
- MS SharePoint: Designer 2007, Designer 2010, WorkSpace 2010
- MS Internet Explorer: Versions 6..8
- MS Outlook Express (no specific versions)
- MSN Messenger: Versions 7.0 and 7.5
- Adobe Acrobat Professional: Versions 6..9
- Adobe Acrobat Reader: Versions 6..9
- AOL Instant messenger (no specific versions)
- Filezilla: Versions 2 and 3
- Mozilla Firefox: Versions 1..3
- Winzip: Versions 9, 12 and 14
- Yahoo Messenger: Versions 7.5 and 8
In addition to the above application specific user settings templates, you also have the ability to grab user settings for the control panel. This can however only be done using a global user setting, as found in the Composition | User settings node. The templates available here currently are:
- Display (XP only)
- Internet Options
- Keyboard Settings
- Mouse settings
- Regional and Language options
- All Control Panel settings
The above settings should make it much easier for you to get a proof-of-concept job going and to harness the full capabilities of RES PowerFuse Zero Profile technology. If your application is not listed here, do not despair though. You still have the ability to create custom User Settings and import them through buildingblocks. This leaves you two options. Either you can check in the Forums if somebody has or would like to share some user settings they’ve created. I’d probably go look in the BuildingBlock board. Second you can always create your own. Using the sampling mode to figure out what an unknown application is doing is a very valuable tool as the log of the sampling mode can be converted directly into user settings.
In addition to the above described key features, there are a bunch of usefull new registry tweaks and enhancements and about 53 fixes. To get all the details, see the releasenotes which you can download below.
Click here to download the SR2 releasenotes: 
Last minute update: I was informed by my good friend Mr. De Koster over at CDG UK that an problem with the license count, using the Workspace Designer seems also to have been solved in SR2. Alledgedly, under some circumstances the workspace designer would not allow you to analyze the number of .DTS files than you actually had licenses for. This has been fixed.
From the cloak & dagger dept. Another technote, RG02A has been posted in the RESguru technote library. This article is a one-of-a-kind, that will explain to you how to get started with PowerFuse in an existing production environment, where you do not care to disturb the users, but want to sneak PowerFuse in through the back door. The solution to this is StealthMode. 
By combining a few console settings and installation parameters, you can fly in under the radar completely unnoticed. The article goes through step-by-step what you need in order to set this up to work correctly. Note; a Wisdom Buildingblock is included for your convenience.
Click here to read the RG02A article
From the we’ve-got-plenty-more-where-that-came-from dept. Another technote, RG028 has been posted in the RESguru technote library. Playing around (maybe a bit rough :) with my Wisdom lab, I managed to mess up a target computer, where the Wisdom agent quite simply refused to uinstall. I decided to investigate and figure out a generic approach to cleaning out an agent completely. Hopefully you will never need to do this, as the Wisdom agent normally uninstalls clean and nice, but hey things sometimes go bump in the night, and this is how to deal with it.
Click here to read the RG028 article
From the technote department. A new technote, RG027 has been posted in the RESguru library. This one covers the usage of Workspace Models in PowerFuse 2010. In the article we will look at how you can make exceptions to default global behavior with practical examples. The article also covers how the inheritance, prioritization, deletion of Workspace Model settings work in detail.
Click here to read the RG027 article
From the Lego-R-Us dept. Today, May 8th I’ve posted a bunch of small Wisdom buildingblocks for your convenience. There’s one to install the Desktop Sampler, theres modules for some generic mucking-about with SQL databases (size query and shrink operations) and I’ve also thrown in one to help shut down an exchange server nicely. As always, if you feel like contributing some cool stuff you’ve made yourself, feel free to poste it over in the forum.
In the meantime go have a look at the new stuff in the Wisdom BuildingBlock Library
From the spring cleaning dept. Ever got frustrated with having a Global Authorized File list which is a mile long? Been wanting to break down your appguard and read-only blanketing security into more manageable chunks? Then this article is for you. It will show you a very slick way of organizing security authorizations using blank/empty applications as placeholders and how you can easily move security settings inbetween them. Note the moving is a PowerFuse 2010 feature.
The article contains a nice buildingblock for you to try out also.
Click here to view the RG026 article.
From the we-work-harder-so-you-don’t-have-to dept. As an administrator or integrator, you may often find yourself in the situation you need to offer certain Controlpanel applets to the users. Unfortunatly PowerFuse doesn’t (yet) offer the ability to import Control Panels as easily as it does regular applications.
To address this, I’ve created a set of buildingblocks which includes every single applet to be found in the standard Windows XP and Windows 7 control panels. On top of that there’s a set of Extras which includes some other nice control panel applets often found. Have a look at what’s inside below: (click to enlarge).
Click here to view the article and download buildingblocks.
Here’s a bit of info which may come in handy for those of you who spend a lot of time cloning machines and contemplating using Wisdom to manage the clones. As you may know, there are 3 methods in RES Wisdom for identifying the agent:
- Using the WUID option
- The MAC address of the first NIC and
- 3) a combo of the computername and domain name.
In an environment where cloning is performed, using option 1 is not recommended as it may lead you to agents disapearing from the Wisdom console. This is due to the fact that the WUID is written into the HKLM portion of the registry, hence it will be part of the image. This is why we usually recommend either using MAC address or domain+computername as the Agent identification method here
When you uninstall the Wisdom Agent, it’s a quite clean operation. However the WUID value will remain on the target machine when you uninstall it. Although this is per design, it may have some unforseen consequences if you are in the middle of building your clone template. Hence it would be nice to know what to clean out in order to forget the Wisdom agent has ever touched a machine.
The registry keys you are looking for are:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\RES\Wisdom\Preferences\WUID
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WUID\Default
If you need to clean out the Wisdom agent completely, make sure you delete both the WUID keys.
Update: August 24th 2010 – This topic has been integrated into Technote RG028.
External stuff, RES Products | RESguru | 
2010/09/03 12:12 | 
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