New RES related blog!

From the RES Community Hero Dept. Today I’d like to introduce a new blog site, which one of my good colleagues, Musa Cakar from RES Support has launched. The blog is called My Virtual Environment, or MYVE.nl. His first article is very useful, as it deals with reducing the size of Mozilla Firefox profiles, using the RES Workspace Manager. Be sure to check out the article here!

New Technote: Dispatcher+ and WebAPI

From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. With the Automation Manager 2012 currently available as RC2, a RESguru article describing the nuts, bolts and registry settings of the new Dispatcher+ has been overdue for a while. To the rescue comes Rob Aarts with a great article, which explains the ins and outs of the new dispatcher component. Also covered in the article is the Master Dispatcher/Cache feature. The most important registry settings to tweak the behavior of the Dispatcher are also covered. Finally the article also covers the new WebAPI for Automation Manager.

<<< Click here to read the article!

The Ultimate Citrix BuildingBlock

‘Twas a month before Xmas and through the hotel, nothing was stirring… well maybe, except for the 450+ geeks and guru’s who assembled at the Hilton Universal City, Los Angeles for the first major Citrix Technology Exchange event on Dec 2nd 2012. RES Software had been invited as a platinum sponsor of the event. Besides showing our products at the vendor’s tables, we also had a couple of presentation slots. I want to take a moment to specially thank my friend Rick Eilenberger at Citrix for putting this great event together. Be sure to check out his follow-up article here.

During one of the RES Software presentations, I had the pleasure of once again demonstrating the unparalleled awesomeness of the RES Automation Manager. This time I had the good Mr. Luca Lo Castro with me on stage, as he is indeed the evil mastermind behind this latest creation. What we have here is nothing less than one of the most awesome Run Books created for RES Automation Manager yet.  Read more »

Grabbing everything Explorer does

From the So-Ein-Ding-Muss-Ich-Auch-Haben Department. Here the other day I came across a nice article by Michel Stevelmans, where he’s taken the time to dig out some really useful explorer registry keys. These are the settings one needs to pick up from the users registry in order to serve up a consistent desktop experience, when moving across a computing estate. While the article was written with a competing vendor in mind, I have the luxury of really not having to care about that. This article will show you how to to put this knowledge into practice with RES Workspace Manager – and yes, you guessed it: BuildingBlock Included!

<<< Click here to read the full article

Technote: Making Dynamic HTML email signatures

From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. Ever wondered how to create nice uniform HTML signatures for your entire company, then to discover there’s someone that needs a different one. Fast forward 6 months you’re faced with having 5 or 6 different email signature templates for Outlook to juggle. If you want a sleek method of dealing with all that, you want to check out this article from resident co-Guru, Sascha Maier. Here you’ll learn how to not only embed different bitmaps into the signature according to group membership, but also how to distribute those bitmaps using RES Workspace Manager’s Custom Resource feature.

<<< Click here to read the article.

PS: This is our 60th article, w00t!

New Technote: Viewing contents of UPR* files

From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. A new article has been published in the Technote library by resident co-author Mr. Patrik Kaak. This time he takes us through how you troubleshoot if you have large User Settings files in Workspace Manager. This article illustrates how to figure out what’s actually being stored inside of these files.

<<< Click here to read the article.

Referencing a NOT NULL string in RES products

From the Interesting Tidbits Dept. Here’s probably the shortest RESguru posting to date, but it’s been a little thing that has been itching to be posted for a while. In all it’s simplicity it’s about how you would reference an empty string in either Automation Manager or Workspace Manager. Since there isn’t a NULL operator per say, we have to rely on our old friend, Mr. PatternMatching. In other words for the uninitiated, RES products supports a pletora of wildcard operators within the text input fields of the products. You can also use variables and functions here. Also check out the RESpedia entry on patternmaching.

The use-cases are many, as you might need to check on environment variables, registry settings, AD properties, file versions or something completely different. Here is a quite simple one: Let’s say we want to check if a variable is set or not. All we have to do is use the pattern “?*” without the quotation marks. The questionmark determines that a single any-character must be present, and the asterisk says that any number of characters including none, may follow. Here on the right is a screenshot which illustrates the usage. PS: Thanks to Dave Bryant for sharing this nugget.

Combining non-persistent images and user installed applications – A really bad idea!

This article stems from that the fact that I’ve been asked several times the same question: “So, I’m looking to do VDI, and I want to use non-persistent / perishable images – but at the same time I want to allow my users to install their own apps. Can you software support that?”. That is what I’m going to address in this article.

For those of you wondering, this article had initially absolutely nothing to do with the whole Citrix/Ringcube thing, as I started writing a month prior to the press release last week. However since it’s a now a reality, it needs to be factored in. I now get questions like; “So, the RingCube/Citrix acuquisition – how does it affect RES?“. The short and precise answer is:

Not At All.

If I was in the business of, oh say… User Virtualization, perhaps I would have reason to worry, however neither layering nor virtualization has ever been in RES Software’s technology sphere. Seen from the point of the RES Workspace Manager, the RingCube offering is just another carrier platform, into which we can inject dynamic settings and manage security on top. Another thing to be aware of: Security around a layered environment is still very relevant to be managed as I presume that certain applications, such as games, torrent clients and other non-business apps aren’t wanted there either. The RES Workspace Manager can control what you are allowed to install, on a very granular level. I will explain this further into this article…

Read more »

Limiting interactions between office components

From the TechNote Dept. A new article from Mr. Dave Bryant explains how you can leverage the File and Folder Security to prevent Office from launching unauthorized Office applications through OLE.

<<< Click here to read the article.

How to use Runbook Parameter Linking

From the technotes-R-us dept. Patrick Kaak has written the second part of his article series on how to wrestle the most out of RES Automation Manager. This time he dives into how to use parameters between modules and run books. This makes short work of expanding existing functionality in Automation Manager Modules. The idea is really simple. For those of you back in the day who started out writing batch files, a module parameter is equivalent to putting in %1, %2 etc into a script.

The beauty of using parameters inside the RES Automation manager is that you can do it without any scripting, yet still benefit from using information which as already been entered across multiple modules.

<- Click here to read the article