The RES Relay Server

From the Skunkworks Dept. As we are approaching the release of Workspace Manager 2012 later this year, here's a sneakpeek into the goodiebag of good things to come. Specifically I've taken the RES Relay Server for a spin and kicked the tires in the lab, in order to give you a better understanding of what this thing is. This technote article should hopefully help you gain a better understanding on what new options we will have at our disposal for designing tomorrows workspace solutions.

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While we're at it, I've updated an old article RG004 – Workspace Manager commandline parameters, so it reflects the new parameters to unattended configure a Relay Server connection for a Workspace Manager 2012 agent. Click here to see the updates.

New technote: Parsing files with AM

From the TechNote Dept: A new article by Patrick Kaak has been posted in the TechLibrary. This time around Patrick shows us the advantages of incorporating existing scripts into RES Automation Manager, illustrating by example how an otherwise semi-static script can be converted into a reusable runbook, which requires no editing what so ever. The example at hand utilizes Thomas Koetzing’s excellent Citrix Hotfix downloader script. By embedding it into an AM runbook you don’t have to ever edit it again. As usual for your convenience, an example buildingblock is included

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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.

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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!

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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…

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