Right now I actually have no clue who’s running the site, although it seems that the folks behind it know me well. I guess that’s how ninja’s roll :-) Believe me, I fully understand the value of running a site incognito initially. Half a decade ago, some marketeers here at the company did not like one bit what I was doing, hence for a while nobody knew who was behind RESguru. Fortunately those individuals are long gone and I am proud to have a fruitful and collaborative relationship with RES Marketing as of today. These folks truly understand the value of having a semi-rogue and opinionated technical blogs like RESguru in the eco-system.

@Sensei (who I gather is the editor at RESninja) -  I am truly happy to see that you folks have joined the ranks of community content providers. Good-natured competition with a bit of attitude never hurts, so I’m stoked to see you guys have “thrown the sword” and taken the challenge. I for one look forward to see what content the ninjas will bring us next!

In general – If you are a start-up tech blogger and you’re writing anything about RES technology, please reach out if you would like to have your site showcased. You don’t need to have created a truckload of material up front – basically one article is enough, as it’s the will to share RES technical knowledge that counts. I would also like to add that if you don’t have your own blog, the doors at RESguru are always open for guest writers.

From the Yay-New-Toys! Dept. Yesterday we got the long awaited Workspace Manager Service Release 3. Due to yours truly being 6-9 hours behind the rest of the RESverse here in the Bay Area, you won’t hear it first on RESguru, but at least I get dibs on diving into the deep end of the feature pool and perhaps fill in a few blanks that you weren’t aware of. This time we’re in for a treat as there are several new SR3 features to look at. [RANT=ON] It took a little while extra tonight, as the retarded WordPress editor decided to hose my article – twice! And autosave had gone fishin’ as well..#@%&! [RANT=OFF] Anyway, you will find the release notes for download at the end of the article. Here is some of the new enhancements and features in no particular order:

WiFi based location detection. This is a biggie which I’ve been looking forward to seeing in the live product as we’ve been testing this for several months.Basically this is a set of new Zone rules which allows you to figure out where a WiFi enabled endpoint physically is, based on what WiFi AccessPoints/Hotspots it’s able to see. Note that Workspace Manager has to be installed on said endpoint. Those of you following me on twitter will already know that there’s a brand-spankin’ new whitepaper released which covers in detail how to configure these new zone rules. One thing I’d like to draw your attention to is that the Diagnostic tab in the users Workspace Preferences now displays the wireless connection details including what other access points are visible, their BSSID’s, MAC and signal strength percentage. It’s however not updated live in this view. There’s a couple of additional notes I’d like to offer as well:

• First, you have two new zone rules available under Network|Wireless : 1) What BSSID you are connected to and 2) The nearest one with the strongest signal. it’s important to understand what is meant by a Trusted Network in the context of Workspace Manager.

• An important topic, to set the expectation level: It is not currently possible to do triangulation of any sorts, like specifying minimum signal strengths or similar in the current wireless zone rules. Second (I have yet to try this), I doubt if you can do a logical AND two or more Wireless rules together anyway. As I understand it, there will only be one that has the strongest signal level so &-ing two or more rules together would never test true if I read this correctly. Comments are welcome.

• While one could certainly wish for a nice overview of discovered access points in Worspace Analysis, it was decided not to do that natively in WM due to privacy concerns. If you are an evil controlfreak like me, still wanting this kind of information at hand, you could consider running an Execute Command job at log-in, with the following Windows command line: netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid. It will give you the same info, but you’d have to collect the output yourself. This can be done much easier with an Execute task in RES Automation Manager.

• While we’re dealing with zones, you may notice a minor cosmetic change as the Zone icon has been replaced. Gone is the ol’ green earth, replaced by a GoogleMap-like ( ) pin icon.

App-V 5.0 support. Three Cheers and a Hurray for this. Where as many workspace engineers around the globe had to come up with nifty workarounds to cater for App-V 5.0 in the interim period before SR3, it’s now supported natively. It is really not a big deal to use it, as all you have to do is point to a folder with .AppV files in it and they will be read in, just like AppV 4.6 and earlier .OSD files. User Settings, Prefetch, Configuration Actions and Process Interception should work fine as well for App-V 5.0 apps. A couple of sidenotes:

• When importing or creating App-V 5 apps, you have to do it from Vista or newer OS. If you try to run the import wizard on Server 2003/XP the Wizard will read any AppV 5 package as blank, i.e. with no apps in it. If you try to create an app from scratch and browse to the .AppV file, the WM console gives you this little number on the right. You can still import .OSD files from App-V 4.6 or earlier, from the console running on any supported OS.
• As there no .OSD file to tinker with, the option to edit it from inside the Managed App (the ‘click here to edit OSD file’) is gone as well for an App-V 5 app.
• The command line for an RES WM managed App-V5 app employs some new tags which look like environment variables but are not variables. An imported command line looks this: %APPVPACKAGEINSTALLATIONROOT% \PackageGUID\%APPVPACKAGECURRENTVERSION%\Root\VFS\ProgramFilesX86\SeqFolder\VirtualApp.exe

Windows 8 Compatibility: There’s been some changes behind the scenes to get things working as smooth as possible. There are however still a couple of gotcha’s you would do well to keep in mind. Quoting directly fom the release notes:

• RES Workspace Manager dialog messages that are directly displayed after session logon will not be visible on the Windows 8 Metro Start Screen.
• Windows Themes: Custom background images selected by the end user in Windows 8 are not applied in Windows 7, though changes made in Windows 7 are applied in Windows 8. Note: this kinda makes sense as it’s not to expected that an older version of Office would understand settings of a newer version.
• When publishing a Managed Application from RES Workspace Manager to a Windows Server 2012, the published application is available in RES Workspace Manager sessions, but it does not appear in the list of published applications in the Windows Server Management Console.

New User Settings Discovery Wizard. This makes it so much easier to create captured settings for an application. Rather than starting from either scratch, a template or adding settings one by one from the SampleMode log, you can now start a Wizard which will, much like we are used to by now with Registry Tracing, create the capture template based on what the application is doing.When you’re editing User Settings on a managed app, hit the Add button and a new option “Discover User Settings” is available.

Note: User Settings also now has a button at the bottom which toggles Basic vs. Advanced user settings. For those already savvy with WM’s User Settings, Advanced mode doesn’t add anything new. What’s changed is that Basic Mode just hides the stuff we normally don’t tinker with, unless special circumstances warrant it. Basic mode looks like shown on the bottom here on the right.

The discovery wizard and the basic/advanced button applies to UserSettings based on Apps as well as those defined globally under Composition|UserSettings

New templates for User Settings. A ton of new UserSettings templates have been added to the list of known applications and OS items, for which Workspace Manager knows out of the box how to grab settings for. For old operating systems, a couple of templates have been added for XP/2003 environments to help migrate user data out. There is now a template respectively for Desktop contents and Desktop icons only, where the first one will grab everything including the kitchensink (Danger, Will Robinson! Large User Settings and henceforth long logon times can result if users are storing many items on the desktop), the latter will only grab .LNK and .URL files. Note: If you want to prevent storage of anything else than shortcuts on the desktops in the future, you probably want to have a look at this article. Also look into the new folder sync options, described on page 16 in the release notes. Besides these things, new templates have been added for IE10 and all the suite applications in Office 2013. It almost goes without saying that Workspace Manager SR3 supports MAPI configuration and email signatures for Outlook 2013 as well.

New Agent-Only installer: As you may have noticed on the WM download page on the RES support portal, there is now a new Agent-Only installer available (filename RES-WM-2012-Agent-SR3.msi). Even though the console can be protected by none less than 3 separate security barriers (no icon, AppGuard process blocking and the internal Administrative Roles), I guess that some folks are just more comfortable having an installer that only puts the RES WM agent (still consisting primarily of the RES service, Kernel drivers and Workspace Composer) on the endpoint. We still have the console-only installer, but as it doesn’t include the RegGuard driver either, the console-only installer is not applicable if you’re planning on using it for Registry Tracing.

Composer Bypass option for Administrators: One thing that’s been driving me nuts for a long time is the fact that as soon as you flipped the composer switch on a WM Agent, Workspace Manager up until now launched the workspace composer regardless if you’re an admin or a regular peon. This has been fixed. Yay! Under Setup|Advanced Settings there’s now a new checkbox (number 3 from the top) that lets you specify a mask or specifically add usernames separated by semicolons for which Workspace Composer should not launch. Bottom line, using this option you can walk up to any regular computer managed with RES WM and if you’re the Man, you get a regular non-RES-managed windows environment.

Enhanced columns and GUI enhancements: Allow me start with another rant: Someone once said to me; “…but, Max all you care about is buttons!” Darn straight I do! – Obviously among other things. Said “buttons” are the interface of the tools we are given and if they suck and swallow, we might as well just forget about the whole thing and go back to scripting. In earnest, I believe that the quality of any solution is equal to the sum of its parts. One of those parts is when you set the tool in question to something and leave it on your workbench, you expect to find it in the same state when you come back. What I’m getting at, are these nice changes:

• Now all list views in Workspace Manager are customizable. Examples are the Composition|Applications|Application list tab or the Security|Authorized files node. What you can do here is drag and drop the order of column headers left and right, resize them and they are remembered for the next time you use the console anywhere else.
• Also the field Administrative Notes has been added to the Application List. Simple things, but nevertheless items that makes a product stand out. Thank you Product Management!
• It’s possible now to batch enable/disable multiple apps from the QuickEdit menu. This also works when right-clicking on a folder in the Applications|Start Menu tab, making it easy to knock out a whole suite with one stroke.
• If you’re running a large environment with many apps, you also should experience significant performance enhancements across the board. These are detailed in the releasenotes.

Last minute erata: It seems that while column properties for lists like Security|Authorized files are roamed from one console to another, the Application List is not roaming, but is being remembered per device. Small potatoes but hey – comment if you see it too.

New Autolaunch options on Managed Apps: You can now take a more granular approach to how managed apps are launched in the users session. Instead of previously just having a autolaunch checkbox alone under the managed apps Settings tab, you can now set the launch on an app as Voluntary, Mandatory or (the default) Take No action. The voluntary option gives an interesting option to organizations who for example would like to say to new users “We think you might like to launch your email when you log in, but if you hate it, you can change it”. The user would make said change in his Workspace Preferences panel. There are probably many other use-cases, but I’ll leave that up to your creativity.

New Drive and Port mapping option for HyperDrive. If you go to Setup|RES Software|HyperDrive and enable the HyperDrive integration in RES Workspace Manager, a new option for mapping drives presents itself under Composition|…|Drive and Port mappings. The releasenotes nor online help are not specific on the format of the Hyperdrive fileserver string, but consulting the HyperDrive admin guide reveals that you can specify a fileserver as a WebDAV URL like this: https://hyperdrive.yourcompany.com/webdav/FileServerName. This kinda makes sense as one of the little known facts of Workspace Manager’s drive mapping mechanism, is that WebDav drive mappings have been supported since way back in 2008. See this article. If this works differently, please comment

New Hyperdrive Client Management settings. While we have HyperDrive fresh in mind, let’s also have a quick look at the new Vault configuration settings. With these you can change the location of the HyperDrive client’s encrypted cache and several other items. See screenshot on the right. Note that your HyperDrive client must be version 4.8.21.10 or newer. If you haven’t done much in terms of HyperDrive integration before, now would be a great time. This part of the console basically allows you to customize and tweak almost every aspect of the HyperDrive clients behavior. Remember, as per usual you can leverage the PlusMenu () to create different Workspace Models for different sets of context.

Last is a hodgepodge of other items which bear short mention:

• Citrix Session Lingering and Prelaunch are now supported. There are really no GUI options to describe or tinker with it. Isn’t it nice when things just…work? :)

• New PWRGATE.EXE -55 parameter to force save and restart. This is an option needed sometimes for SCCM packages that need a reboot to work properly. See the updated Secrets of PwrGate article for details.

• New unattended installation parameter CONNECTFILE. This allows you to specify an file containing encrypted datastore connection. For more details, see the updated WM parameter guide.

• New entry for the PWRUSER.INI file in the user’s \Personal Settings folder to tweak printer notification behavior. NotifyDefaultPrinterChange=No|OncePerLocation. For now see page 27 of the release notes below for further info. Keep an eye out for a future PWRUSER.INI reference.

• Threshold option to use cached AD credentials if DC is too slow. Under Setup|Advanced there is a new option (2nd from the bottom) to specify a latency threshold in milisecs if locally cached credendials should be used instead of pulling them from the Domain Controller. This should help speed things up as well.

To wrap things up, the WM ServicePack 3 is indeed a massive update, containing over 65 new enhancements and features and even more bugfixes, so this article would get quite exhaustive if I was to screenshot and discuss every one of them. Instead I would urge you to download the release notes and have a look for yourself. If there are any particular feature you would like to see further highlighted, comment below or hit me up on Twitter.

Click here to download the WM2012 SR3 release notes:

<<< Click here to open the Guide.

<<< Click here to view the latest registry tweaks in the guide.

Note: if you want to get an earlier heads-up on updates and new articles on this site, consider following @RESguru on Twitter.

<<< Click here to read the article

<<< Click here to read the article

<<< Click here to read the article.

From the Blast-from-the-Past Dept. A while back I was sorting some old CD medias and I came across one which made me pause for a bit: It was none other than one of the very first publically available versions of a RES product, the PowerMenu 2000 product. Yeah, so this was back in the late nineties, where everything sold better if you put the number 2000 after it :-) Anyway, PowerMenu 2000 was the ancient forerunner of the product of 14 years later, known today as the RES Workspace Manager. The grand purpose of this article is to show you how ahead of it’s time, PowerMenu 2000 really was. Second, here’s a chance for a trip down memory lane to visit the humble roots, of what is today in my opinion one of the most stellar enterprise management software suites on the market today.

My inspiration for ths article came from the well known Chain of Fools video, where the author goes through upgrading from MSDOS 5.0 all the way up to Win7. Knowing the easy upgrade methodology employed by RES from day one, I’m willing to wager the usual bottle of Danish Akvavit (known stateside as battery acid :) that you can do the same with PowerMenu 2000 all the way up to Workspace Manager 2012 in a similar fashion. The only major hurdle to pass here is migrating from PowerFuse 7.03 to PowerFuse 2008 as you had to do a complete datastore migration. In case you’re wondering about that, read this article from the archives. Other than that it’s just upgrading one RES PowerPack or Servicepack to the next.

The PowerMenu 2000 product was launched during the 32bit Winframe/NT 4.0 TSE days, so in order to give the software a compatible fighting chance to actually work, I installed it on an x86 Windows 2003 server and it still ran without a hitch. Fun fact: Now you know the reason why the default name for the RES created folder in the user’s homedrive pre WM SR1 was “PWRMENU”. For the record this folder in current versions of WM is now called Personal Settings.

When installing PowerMenu 2000, it’s noteworthy that the entire ISO with presentations, docs and everything is about the same size as the MSI installer of today: Around 35 MB. Back then we still used InstallShield though. The entire thing was pretty much a next, next finish job, as it still is today:

During installation, we prompted for a fileshare. For those of you unfamiliar with RES history, this share was home of the original FoxPro based configuration settings database. This was the same deal up to and including PowerFuse 7.03, until we went 100% SQL back in PowerFuse 2008. Today RES Workspace Manager supports every MS SQL version from version 2000 and up including SQL Azure, Oracle, MySQL and IBM DB2.

After installation the product could launch straight into the managed desktop executable, which today still is available in Workspace Manager 2012, known here as the RES Shell. There is a still relevant article available here, which shows you how to make use of it to get your Start Menu back on Windows 8. Back in 1999 PowerMenu did not have any support for the native Explorer. This was due to the fact that many customers had up until then been using it on top of Citrix Winframe, which had no Explorer. The user shell with PowerMenu 2000 looked like this:

During launch you’d see these two splash screens. On the left was the original PowerMenu 2000 splash screen, which back then was mandatory. Today’s Workspace Manager obviously allows you to turn it off. On the right you see the original restrictions of running trial mode on the product. Also note the old triangle RES logo – that’s what we looked like back then! :)

At this point you’re probably wondering; okay then, what could this old WM precursor do then? What was it’s operational scope? Well, back then it actually covered several of the main areas that the Workspace Manager of today does, including configuration, performance and a bit of security. One thing that definitely wasn’t in the product then, was any kind of profile management like the User Settings of today. Managing user settings from the profile was however still a pretty new concept then as CCS had barely thought up Hybrid Profiles at that time. Let’s have a look at what the management console (known then as the Enterprise Manager) looked like:

Granted, there wasn’t a whole lot of options back then, however the basic premise of editing a Managed Application within an application tree or list, is a solid concept that lives on today. Even the Audit log was there to begin with. If you notice the blue fields in the upper right they indicate who created and changed the current object and when.

Presuming you know your way around the current version of the Workspace Manager product, you are likely to recognize some features in PowerMenu’s managed applications, which are present in the current releases. Access Control was pretty much the same, although AD and OU’s weren’t supported as an Access Principal back then. This is probably due to the fact that Windows 2000 was barely out of the box at that time…

,

In the lower left corner above, you’ll recognize the license management and enforcement, which still looks pretty much the same in WM, although it now lives on it’s own separate tab in the console. Funny thing here is that the Cost field still to this day isn’t being used for anything just yet. Of interest here as well is the PowerHours/Opening Hours feature. You will find this exact feature (with the same dialog) is still in the WM product under the properties of a managed app, below Access Control | Time Restrictions | Basic tab. Already back then RES did ODBC Datasources. Today it still works in pretty much the same way.

Now, let’s have a look at the PowerLaunch options. The term PowerLaunch is still to this day occasionally being used by yours truly and some of our other oldschoolers, when referencing as a whole things that happen during user logon in Workspace Manager:

Specifically these are things like printer/drive mappings, drive substitutions, registry hacks, environment variables, files and folder created in the users homedrive, and external tasks were already there as well. One thing I’d like to emphasize is the registry editor. It still looks like it’s former self without many changes. Due to the lack of kernal drivers back then, we did not have the Registry Tracing feature, which came later in PowerFuse 2010.

On the same note here is the security option of lore, known as PowerSense. Today the Workspace Manager security model includes subsystems for Process security, Read-Only Blanketing, File and Folders, Removable Devices, Session, URL and layer 3 Network security. The beginnings were somewhat more humble:

Back in PowerMenu 2000, the way that PowerSense worked, was that unauthorized processes were simply killed uppon detection, rather than preemtively blocked at the kernel layer. I believe we already started introducing the original AppGuard kernel driver somewhere in early PowerFuse series 7 in the early 00′s.

Another item of interest is a personal all-time favorite feature of mine, Access Balancing, which has been largely unmodified for 14 years:

While it was originally designed as a login-throttle for Winframe/Terminal Servers, there is a separate article here on how to use it even today to obtain valuable statistics about user logon time. On the topic of statistics, it’s also worth mentioning that PowerMenu 2000 included already then the first pieces of Usage Tracking, known back then as PowerWatch.

There are many interesting little tidbits and mental morsels to savor in this piece of old software. I hope however, with this little trip down memory lane, to have shown you both how far ahead of the curve RES technology was already back in 1999 and at the same time indirectly how amazingly far we have come since then. Not only has Workspace Manager evolved over the years into a fullblown enterprise class management software suite, but let’s not forget about the 5 other product lines which has rolled off the block since then: Automation Manager, IT Service Store, VDX, Hyperdrive and BDA.

I for one can’t wait to see what the next 14 years will bring!

Normally, I couldn’t care less about the particular species of subhumans responsible, also known as blog spammers. These pathetic excuses for Mechanical Turks apparently sit all day long and spend countless hours to manually defeat captcha’s in order to paste in absolute commercial garbage on any and all blogs they can find. In case you’re wondering, RESguru.com has multiple spamfilters and other nifty defence mechanisms in place, which up until now has had a 100% success rate in filtering out these morons. Allow me to share the score so far:

RESguru: 34,175 – Spammers: 0

Not a single piece of spam commentary has made it onto any page of the blog and never will as long as I’m running this tugboat. What really intrigues me though, is the level of creativeness that these yahoos put into crafting generic comments to get your attention. I want to share a particular one that I got today. For obvious reason the linked crap this individual is peddling has been surgically removed and since 99.9% of all spammers use bogus email addresses that have been omitted as well. Here we go:

“I don’t write many remarks, however I browsed a great deal of responses on this page The RESguru Blog! ? RG04A – Integrating Citrix XA6.5 Prelaunch with WM. I actually do have some questions for you if you do not mind. Could it be only me or do a few of the responses appear like they are written by brain dead visitors? :-P And, if you are writing at other social sites, I’d like to keep up with anything fresh you have to post. Would you make a list of every one of all your social community pages like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?“

What a bunch of dribble. Somebody need to beat this “induhvidual” with a clue-bat. The morale of the story is this: If you ever learn that one of your friends or your neighbor is a spammer, the Internet ar large will likely thank you for breaking all their fingers so they can’t use a keyboard for a while. If the problem persists, you need to tune it out. Some people prefer Mozart and Chopin. I’d recommend anything sharp and motorized from Black and Decker. ‘Nuff said.

Note: Your friendly local law enforcement may take a rather dim view of these types of activities, so don’t expect the ol’ The-RESguru-Made-Me-Do-It-defence to keep your butt out of jail :) Please refer to the M.O.A.D.

From the There-We-Fixed-It Dept. Once again it’s that time of year where we get the extra presents that didn’t quite make it under the tree. Today RES Software released the long awaited Service Release 2 for RES Workspace Manager. As always due to that I’m on Pacific time, I’m more or less the last RES guy on the planet to know – but hey – at least I can share the nitty-gritty details with you. This time around you’re in for a treat, as the the update contains a massive overhaul on the Citrix publishing subsystems, among other things. As per usual the Service Release is available to our subscribed customers and partners at the RES Support portal. Now, let’s have a quick look at the most interesting things in SR2:

• Ability to remote publish XenApp published apps ! Yay – this was a personal thorn in my side, as up to now the only way to publish was to run the RES WM console on top of one of the XenApp boxes, as we previously could only communicate with the old MFCOM objects directly underneath. You still need a WM Agent installed on the target publishing XenApp server, as it’s the one doing the handywork. The difference is that now you can publish even from an admin workstation running the WM console.
• Support for XenApp 6.5 WorkerGroups: Another big enhancement on my wishlist. Even though that Workspace Manager has had servergroups for many years providing this functionality back from the early Citrix Presentation Server days, when Citrix finally added a group object in XAS6.5, we of course had to support it, so customers do not have to do double work.
• Cross-Farm publishing: RES Workspace Manager SR2 allows you to publish an XA app across multiple farms. Note that if you’re using Relay Servers, they must be upgraded to SR2 as well for this to work.

There is a few other items that relate to Citrix, which you can read more about in the release notes. Other than that, some other noteworthy items:

• A slew of new registry tweaks to Workspace Manager. The Registry Guide to Workspace Manager has been updated accordingly. See fixes 073 to 066
• Various performance enhancements on Database Connectivity, User Settings and Logon time. Note: There is a specific reghack to boost logon time when offline. 
• A new setting under Setup|Advanced Settings: The option is to quote the release notes; “set delay for network refreshes when network connectivity changes”. This works well where a laptop may change network connectivity within a short period of time, possibly causing unnecessary Workspace Composer refreshes. Also, by configuring a delay, you can ensure that the ‘new’ network connection is fully established before the refresh takes place, preventing long refresh actions. Default value is 0 (zero) seconds, meaning it’s business as usual unless you change it.
• Hiding apps in the startmenu when using merge-mode is now possible when managing the startmenu. Something I’m personally quite happy about, as I got egg on my face during my last training class due to just that :-)
• Several labels and default views have changed as part of decluttering the console. Nothing crucial, but you might just want to glance over the releasenotes to for a heads-up on all items.
• New Zone rule for computer’s AD group membership. This has been a long standing wish of mine since we could check on the site and OU of the computer, so now this part of the big picture is complete.
• New commandline option to export the Network Security log as XML. See this section of the updated WM CommandLine reference for further info.
• Exception tab on Agents: I believe this is a very important piece to understand for designers and architects (which is why it probably deserves it’s own article at some point): The short story about SR2, quoting from the releasenotes, is that Agent-related zone rules set on the Workspace Container are now taken into account when determining the applicability of an exception tab for the node Administration | Agents. This makes it possible, for example, to define different Datastore or Relay Server connections on exception tabs based on Agent-specific properties such as IP address. Note that the following zone rules are not Agent-specific and are therefore not evaluated when defining the Workspace Containers on which to base an exception tab for the Agents node:
  • Citrix Receiver client type
  • Session Type
  • (Partial) terminal server listener name
  • User property
  • VDX / Workspace Extender

  The Workspace Container’s Access Control/Identity is still ignored for exception tabs on the node Administration > Agents; and the evaluation of Workspace Container applicability for an exception tab remains unchanged for all other features and nodes.

• Last but not least is the question on everybody’s lips: Does SR2 support Windows 8? The answer is yes and no. Yes, the software is supported running on Windows 8. Yes, it can now recognize Windows 8 as there’s now OS Zone rules for Win8 and Server 2012. This makes the temporary hack I created in article RG04C obsolete. However SR2 does NOT include management of the Metro/Modern tiles. Aparently there are some things we are working on together with Microsoft in order to make that a reality. Hopefully we’ll see this in the next Service Release.

For now, here are the releasenotes for you to download:

Enjoy!