The RESguru PowerBlog!

More Wisdom buildingblocks

RESguru — Sat, 08 May 2010 09:57:03 +0000

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

New Technote: Global Authorized Files Cleanup!

RESguru — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:08:12 +0000

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.

New technote: Control Panel applets for PowerFuse

RESguru — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:42:11 +0000

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.

Cleaning out the Wisdom agent completely

RESguru — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 02:20:56 +0000

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.

New Technote: Secrets of PWRGATE.EXE

RESguru — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:00:45 +0000

A new article has been posted in the Technote Library. The subject is an obscure little executable, called PWRGATE.EXE, which is part of PowerFuse. In the 2010 release, you are able to do many interesting things with this program, such as launching many of the PowerFuse components directly. You are now also able to lauch the User Installed Applications (formerly known as Partially Managed Workstations) wizard directly, so users don’t have to go through the old PowerPanel. Of course they are still able to do that if enabled, that is. As a part of this article, I have created buildingblocks which you can import into your own environment to get access to these apps.

Click here to view the article.

RES Wisdom Visio Shapes

RESguru — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:21:07 +0000

From the creative dept. One of our esteemed RES usergroup comunity members, pkaak has taken the time to create a set of Microsoft Visio shapes for RES Wisdom. Good man! This is the first go, which includes just the basic stuf like Datastore, Disapatchers and agents. Nevertheless it’s a great start and I would urge you all to try them out and give Pkaak feedback in the forum.

The thread can be found here and here’s a direct link for downloading the Visio shapes.

Manage multiple config sets for 1 app!

RESguru — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:48:35 +0000

Another technote has been published in the Technote Library. This one will teach you how to configure PowerFuse to prompt users for settings when they launch an application. This is extremely usefull for prod/test/dev scenarios, where you would like to avoid having multiple definitions of the same application to maintain. The whole thing revolves about the usage of workspace containers, so if you’ve been dodging learing what workspace containers are about, with the release of PowerFuse 2010 it ‘s a good time to grab the bull by it’s horns. If you still feel a bit in the dark about what Workspace containers are and what they can be used for, have a look at this other article, which is a work in progress as we’re constantly adding new uses for these objects.

The new article, called RG023 Managing multiple config sets for one app, also describes how to use the new Registry Tracer feature in PowerFuse 2010.

Click here to read the full article

PRINTERS.LST – The forgotten feature

RESguru — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:26:23 +0000

From the Technotes-R-Us Dept. A new technote RG022 has been submitted to the library. This time the topic is a special file, which actually has been with us for several years, the PRINTER.LST file. What it does is allow you to completely independently of existing printerserver naming conventions, to build a tree of well known geographical or physical locations to which the users actually can relate, when selecting a printer with Printing Preferences (formerly known as PowerPrint). The end result can look like this example, I’ve created here on the right.

Go read the full article here.

New videos – Updated article

RESguru — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 01:18:35 +0000

A set of new videoclips related to PowerFuse 2010 has been released. These explain what workspace management is all about. There is also a nice video which highlights the new stuff in 2010, mainly focussing on the desktop transformation bits. Anyway, I’ve updated the old RG01D article which refers to all the videos which are currently out there.

Go have a look at the updated article

PowerFuse 2010 – It’s ALIVE!

RESguru — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 01:31:24 +0000

From the Hot-off-the-press dept. Finally Febuary 16th has arrived and it’s ReleaseDay! PowerFuse 2010 RC2 is now available on the portal for download for existing customers. There are tonnes of new improvements which you can read all about in the releasenotes. While you are at it, go check out the updated Glossary which now contains definitions of all the new technology.

Initially, may I direct your attention to the Corp. Website where you can download alot of PowerFuse 2010 info already. Scroll down to the end of this page and you will find them.

For those already working the RC1, the major deltas are that the [+] PlusMenu now is implemented for the Workspace Model node and Active Directory Sites are now supported as a new PowerZ… erm Location Rule. The new rule looks like shown here on the right.

Over the next couple of months, expect to see many more feature related articles describing how you can put the new features of RES PowerFuse to work for YOU!

Oh, and feel free to download the ReleaseNotes here :