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Since the successful release of Scense 8, last November, our development teams have been very busy working on the service release of our next generation workspace management solution. We added scheduled feature enhancements and improvements as well as improvements based on customer and partner feedback. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the successful release of Scense 8, last November, our development teams have been very busy working on the service release of our next generation workspace management solution. We added scheduled feature enhancements and improvements as well as improvements based on customer and partner feedback. Scense 8.1 will contain over 30 enhancements and improvements. A short list with some examples is available in this blog post.

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We are on the eve of a challenging year from a personal view and from an IT perspective. Economic and social developments in 2013 will again force us to look twice at our expenses, including the investments related to IT. Meanwhile the claim of the user organization for more freedom and service is more prominent than ever before. We will need to provide more services with fewer resources: a familiar sound?

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There has been a lot of talk about User Installed Applications recently,  especially in non- persistent virtual desktop environments.  The need for a solution that helps end users keep the software they installed themselves, even after a desktop refresh, is becoming very important.  A recent comparison on Briforum 2011 has shown that none of the discussed vendors has the right approach to this concept. Check the brianmadden.com website for a recording of this session: User Installed Apps: Why No Vendor is Doing it Correctly (And Why Not), a video from BriForum 2011.

Scense has been supporting the ability for end users to install their own applications. The requirements mentioned in the video help to explain how:

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Recently, Microsoft announced a new product in beta called User Experience Virtualization (UE-V short). With UE-V, App-V 5.0 will also go into beta.

Microsoft has been relying for years on roaming profiles to help end users with a consistent user experience on multiple devices. The drawbacks of this solution are well known: long logon times, last writer wins issues, profile corruption, inconsistency between OS versions etc.

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As of today Scense 7.6 (build 1234) will be available for download. Scense 7.6 includes our approach to user profile management: Scense Live Profiles. Next to Live Profiles, Scense 7.6 includes product enhancements and improvements and a number of fixes. The release notes and known issues can be found below: Read the rest of this entry »

Windows user profiles are critical assets in today’s desktop environments. They aim to increase end user productivity by ensuring a predictable and familiar user experience and reliable access to personal data. A Windows user profile that is unavailable or broken will inevitably result in helpdesk calls and loss of productivity. For years, we have relied on classic Windows (roaming) profiles to provide end users with settings and data. End users demanding flexibility, Windows OS migrations and new technologies like desktop and application virtualization have proven Windows (roaming) profiles to be insufficient to support our demands. As a result a new market with alternative profile management solutions was created.

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Hosted desktop virtualization has been around for quite some time now. The benefits are well known, the technology matures but adoption remains low. In 2009, Gartner expected a 15% market share for corporate desktops in 2014 resulting in 66 million connected devices. Today we know that these numbers will be lower, much lower. But why?

High capex and\or the financial crisis might be part of the problem but is for sure not the main cause. Even large service providers, offering hosted virtual desktops as a service (pay as you go) are also not meeting the numbers they aimed for.  So it is not just about the money.

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Virtualization, in its roots, has been around for many decades starting with the mainframes in the late 1960’s, but only in the last decade virtualization has been broadly accepted and became mainstream. The best known virtualization technology “Virtual OS” was actually popularized in the last 5 years. At the same time the virtualization reference model called the “Virtualization stack” started to evolve into one of the preeminent known architecture models for our current modern IT infrastructure.

In essence the Virtualization Stack allows us to decouple the different infrastructure layers used to create the fundament of the IT infrastructure for organizations. In the past, all IT layers were bound together and were dependent on the weakest link in the chain. Because of virtualization technologies we can now add or remove IT layers without jeopardizing the total IT infrastructure framework we have built for our organizations. This virtualization stack is also becoming one of the essential pillars for the IT trend of Cloud Computing (being Private/Public or Hybrid Clouds). We will cover the Cloud Computing’s ins and outs in one of our future whitepapers.

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In order to support partners, suppliers, and customers dispersed across the globe, the workforce has become more mobile, and work happens wherever business takes place. As businesses compete in a global economy, they rely on their mobile workforce to ensure product innovation and customer satisfaction. It is therefore critical for businesses to provide their workforce with easy access to the right data, tools, and applications to do their jobs successfully—at any time and from anywhere.

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