About
So who is this RESguru fellow anyway? Let’s set the record straight:
Name: Max Ranzau (follow me on Twitter here)
Occupation: Partner Enablement Manager at at RES Software US.
Role on RESguru.com: Creator and lead author.
Geek bias towards using the product? Absolutely yes! I absolutely love working with the RES products and did so long before I joined the company. Gurgling the corporate kool-aid? Absolutely no! Giving you the straight dope on what can be accomplished with the RES products? Absolutely Yes! That’s what the RESguru blog is all about.
I do not view RESguru.com as the work of just one guy. Yes, I did indeed put up the site and have supplied the majority of articles as to date. However I have been joined by industry professionals who have supplied materials, which I have had the privilege to share with you all.
Since early 2002, I have worked with the products of RES Software, where I was originally trained by the [God]Father of PowerFuse himself, Mr. Bob Janssen. For most of my professional career, I’ve been a international consultant and instructor in Citrix, Softricity (now MS App-V), and of course RES Software products. The RES and (formerly) Softricity had two things in common:
- They have changed the way many of us IT professionals work for the better.
- The products were (windows) platform agnostic. They worked well regardless if you are dealing with Laptops, Workstations and/or terminal servers. With or without Citrix on top.
Where RES made the difference in my career, was the fact that it enabled me to once and for all get rid of all the shoestring-and-gumball solutions which I made my living going out to fix, maintain, repair, cleaning up, rebuilding or otherwise deal with. I was up to my elbows in scripts (batch files, kix, vbs – take your pick), Group Policy templates, all sorts of third party freeware point-solution utilities. But hey, c’mon – These were the only tools we had at our disposal back then. I hated however as much as the next guy, to go on-site, having to deal with, quote “inheriting somebody else’s old pants” in the form of sifting through some 2-mile long, ultra compacted VBScript with hardly any comments except for the name of the nitwit who wrote it.
Back then, there was a mindset among some, to keep as much information to yourself, make whatever you made as obfuscated as possible, leaving bloody useless documentation and so on. All this in a misunderstood quest for peer recognition and/or job security. I believe what kept me on the sharing side of things, was the fact that I became a CCI (Citrix Instructor back in the WinFrame days) Through teaching the product, I came to a realization which I believe many instructors may have shared at one point or another:
The more you give – The more you get
No matter how many nuggets of wisdom you share with people, they would always come back for more, and guess what – they would usually bring something cool to the table and share with you. In the classroom I usually ended up leaving as educated as my students, as they would share all sorts of interesting things about microsoft technologies, Novell, Notes, etc. etc. I would then use things I learnt later on as part of the next series of courses I held. PowerFuse made the difference, that I finally had a platform on which I could store and structure all the aquired knowledge of configuration items, and I could re-use them across any Windows platform.
Okay, let’s pause right there for a sec for a reality check: PowerFuse was originally written to work on Terminal Server / Citrix only. It was only further down the road (in series 6.something, I think) that we started to support laptops and workstations. Even then it was rather sketchy to deal with, as you had to run multiple databases as Terminal Server Site licenses back then could not be mixed with Workstation/Laptop licenses. Also we still had to deal with the fileshare-based PowerFuse database. The thing is about that fileshare - nobody had a clue 10 years ago that people one day would be wanting to use our particular brand of User Workspace Management across 10′s of thousands workstations concurrently on multiple sites world wide.
To serve as an equivalent; those of you old-timers , who remember the internal workings of the Citrix Winframe Master Browser model, might recall that it was also a complete mess which would not scale very well. In short, imagine you drew 25 boxes on a piece of paper. Connect them all with lines and you pretty much had the master browser model! Citrix recognized something had to be done about this and came up with the Datastore model in Metaframe XP which essentially the same model which RES PowerFuse 200x uses. In short, something had to be done and RES did it.
This did however not change the fact that I felt I had essentially the IT-equivalent of Tolkien’s Ring: One Console to Rule them All. The real breakthrough in the cross-environment support however came with the release in late ’07 of PowerFuse 2008. All of a sudden we could now conveniently deal with managing Citrix/TS, Workstations, Laptops, Tablet PC’s and what-have-you, from this singular point of administration.
This was in fact huge. As I saw it, what we got with PowerFuse was a big filing cabinet, ready to receive and organize all the crap which was floating around in many IT environments. Here was the chance to tidy things up and keep them that way – Once and for all. The secret sauce was Workspace Containers.
The RESguru.com site was originally kicked into gear with the purpose of getting out as much information about RES Products as possible. There simply wasn’t enough information readily available out there. The KB was bolted down under lock and key, only accessible to SA customers. This is fortunatly now changing as RES is working hard to open the KB up for indexing by Google etc. Originally I had to do this project under wraps, due to the fact that the company hadn’t quite come to grips with the legal complications of a ‘rogue employee blog’ was out there. Anyway, before long – pretty much everyone knew who’s brainchild it was anyway. Things became much easier when Yuri Haak and I decided to join forces, effectively making RESguru.com a part of the RES User Group community.
Today and onwards it is the intention to continue to provide tips and tricks using RES products to the community.
Thanks for your interest.
RESguru | 
2009/03/11 21:56
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