From the get-to-the-choppa dept. The short answer to the title question is: YES! If you’re still on PowerFuse 2008, this would be a great time to consider upgrading. Although RES Software does not currently not enforce an end-of-life policy for the 2008 product, you would do well to consider the advantages of upgrading. The effective policy is as long as there is a viable number of customers who utilizes a given version, that version is supported, however new features will not be added to that version. As many of these questions usually end up in my inbox anyway, I have written this piece to cover some of the most common reservations and concerns that the few remaining PF2008 customers may have. It is my ambition to dispell some of the misconceptions about an upgrade from PowerFuse 2008.

First of all, if you are a paying SA customer, it is usually a great idea to keep a mindful eye on available upgrades, regardless of what vendor you’re dealing with. Besides support, the right to upgrade is essentially what your money is buying. Check this article on how to subscribe to updates from RES Software’s knowledgebase. At the time of writing, RES Workspace Manager 2011 has now been GA released for about 2 months and we’ve receved loads of positive feedback on it already. For the purpose of clarifying outstanding questions, concerns and general uncertanties, I’ve put together a FAQ on the topic of upgrading:

Right, so why should I upgrade my PowerFuse 2008 in the first place?

If you like the old PowerFuse 2008, you will love what we’ve done with the newer Workspace Manager products. If you haven’t noticed we changed the name effective last year. The primary reason for upgrading is because all the features of newer releases of will not be retrofitted into an old product. RES Software will only continue to maintain the 2008 software in terms of fixing software errors. Another reason is that the 2008 version is not suitable for using in environments where you need granular control of what configuration items are enabled. The main difference between 2008 and newer versions is that everything was switched on out of the box making new deployments much easier. However as an existing customer, chances are that you’ve already gone through all this. Your environment is already built, so what’s in it for you then? The main points to consider are:

• Are you planning to expand/move or otherwise change your existing environment?
• Are you paying SA? Then the upgrade is paid for already.
• What new features are in the newer products which aren’t in 2008?

There are scores of new stuff that’s been added to the Workspace Manager product since the 2008 days. However, there are two specific features I would like to highlight at this point. First off is the ability to move settings between Global and Applications. This means that items such as global authorized file rules more easily can be attached to the apps where they belong. Chances are, if you’re still on PowerFuse 2008 that you have a Global Authorized Files list half a mile long. That’s not good as you can easily miss things in it and it will get cumbersome to maintain the more rules you stick in there. With Workspace Manager 2010 and up it’s really a snap to deal with as you can just rightclick the rules in question and move them to the application for which they belong. This opens up another possibility. You can create empty applications and use them as placeholders for collections of rules and settings. Yes you can in fact move PowerLaunch settings into applications also. There is a description of how all this works in article RG026.

The other major feature which I think will be of use to you, is the Desktop Transformation facility. Having the ability to analyze existing unmanaged environments, and automagically create rules out of the real-world sampled data is in my opinion invaluable. You can find loads of good information about the whole process in the Administrative Guide (look specifically at pages) Also take a look at this article about the basics of Dynamic Desktops, where I describe the Desktop Sampling process.

Below I’ve tried to answer the questions that we’ve come across most often:

“But I went through a PowerFuse 7.03 to PowerFuse 2008 upgrade and it was complicated. I am not thrilled by the prospect of having to do that again. Can you blame me?”

No I can’t blame you for feeling that way, however technically what you went through going from 7.x to 2008, was not an upgrade – it was a fullblown Migration. Since you went from one database format to another, extra steps had to be taken. Back in the old days of PowerFuse 7.x and earlier, a fileshare was used for the central configuration datastore. Although we did our best to do just that, lifting that old fileshare into a pure SQL relational database was not as easy as next, next, finish – especially when we had to offer you a method which was applicable and riskless for a production environment. Those last few customers who are still on 7.x, or those who are just curious to the migration process, should check out the posting here about 7x to 20xx migration.

“Okay fine, but I heard you guys changed the console a lot? I am not comfortable with a new console as things won’t be where I’m used to. Do you have a roadmap so I can find my way?”

Yes & Yes. We did indeed change the console – for the better, I might add. If we had continued to indiscriminantly bolt on functionality to the old monolithic PF2008 console tree, it would have ended up being a mile long. Second – yes, we have a nice roadmap available for the last of you 2008′ers out there. It’s built right into the online help of the Workspace Manager’s console. For easy reference, I’ve added it here also. It will show exactly where the old stuff was and where you will find the new locations. Bear in mind that we re-aranged the console primarily to make it easier for you to find what you’re looking for, as we’re continually adding more and more functionality to Workspace Manager. Essentially we merely broke the old PowerFuse 2008 console up into 5 main nodes:

• Context: Who you are, where you are, what device you’re using, etc
• Composition: What you’re going to get as a result of that
• Security: Making sure that things stay that way
• Diagnostics: What’s going on.
• Setup: Basically all the set-n-forget stuff.

You will probably recognize the design from Microsoft Outlook, which hopefully should make you feel right at home to begin with. Also from the 2010 release and up we changed the messaging around what it is we do. You may have seen the hand drawing of the Context/Composition/Security. We actually designed the console around that entire paradigm. Below here is a quick guide taken from the online help, which should make it easier for you to adapt to the new console. Really, it’s simple.

Click here to download the guide:

“I’m not entirely convinced. How difficult is it to upgrade my 2008 installation to the latest and greatest?”

At the time of writing that would be Workspace Manager 2011, Service Release 1. It’s not difficult at all. The process consists of the following three steps:

1. Log on to the RES Support portal here.
2. Download the latest upgrade pack. Notice there are two versions: A manual and an unattended. You should always use the manual version for the first machine to upgrade. The reason for this is that some changes may be needed to be done on the PowerFuse 2008 datastore when upgrading it to the Workspace 2011 version. The unattended version of the software does NOT do this per design.
3. Run the unattended upgrade pack on each subsequent endpoint after that, i.e. run it where PowerFuse 2008 is currently installed. You can use your favorite software deployment tool to get it out there.

But the splash screen will change, right?

True, it will, as it did with every major release version of the product. However since PowerFuse 2008 there has been an option (back then a registry setting) which would hide the splash screen. In Workspace Manager 2011 the same option is built into the console. In other words, if you switch off the splash screen already before upgrade, your users won’t notice a thing.

“But I let my SA expire and didn’t renew it…”

Ah.. well that’s an entirely different ballgame and has nothing to do with technology per say. I suggest you contact your local RES partner or representative, to find out what your available options are. As much as we want to welcome you back into the RES family, there is obviously some form of commercial matter to be discussed in this particular scenario. You will find that’s the case regardless of which vendor you deal with.

“Okay, so I found out we’re still on SA, but I can’t find my login to the RES portal?”

That is an easy situation to deal with. There are two situations at hand. Either you are the portal admin for your company or somebody else is. If you know you are the portal admin, and have forgotten your credentials, you need to get in touch with RES Support and ask them to reset your credentials. If you don’t know who your portal admin is at your company, RES can also tell you that. If you by some odd chance never got around to registering on the RES portal, I’ve got a nice article for you right here.

With this article, I hope to have given those of you still on PowerFuse 2008 the necessary information to feel comfortable about moving into the Workspace Manager. Happy upgrading!

Today RES released a cool utility which will help existing XenApp customers implement PowerFuse way more swiftly. What the tool does is read existing published applications from a serverfarm, create the applications inside PowerFuse and create new PowerFuse managed published applications. It even reads any existing file associations configured in the Xenapp environment – Übercool!

There is a nice PDF which describes things well here:   The Migration tool can be downloaded from RES here.

Remember, you saw it first on RESguru.com! ;-)

One of the friendly folks at RES Software (in this case yours truely! ;-) made this presentation, which describes in detail how to migrate  a legacy PowerFuse 7.x installation to PowerFuse 2008 or higher. This presentation  goes through everything, even how new WorkSpaces should be created for hybrid environments with both laptops, workstations and terminalservers. Note, check out the speaker notes, as there are a ton of details in there.

Note1: The presentation was originally created back in June 2008 and was based on a 7.03 to PF2008 migration, but is perfectly valid for a migration directly to Powerfuse 2010 or Workspace Manager 2011. The dialog boxes may have changed a bit since PowerFuse 2008, but the procedure is the same.

Note2: Be sure to read the speaker notes in the presentation, as they contain all the commentary necessary to understand and/or present the migration procedure.

Download the presentation here: