Digital Workspace needs UEM

User Environment Manager offers personalization and dynamic policy configuration across any virtual, physical and cloud-based VDI / Non VDI environment. User Environment Manager simplifies end-user profile management by providing organizations with a single, lightweight and scalable solution that leverages existing infrastructure. It accelerates time-to desktop and time-to-application by replacing bloated roaming profiles and unmaintainable, complex logon scripts. It maps environmental settings (such as networks and printers), and dynamically applies end-user security policies and personalization’s. Utilizing the VMware Horizon? Cloud Manager, this focused, powerful and scalable solution is engineered to deliver workplace productivity while driving down the cost of day-to-day desktop support and operations.

User Environment Manager

When it comes to desktop virtualization, many organizations have traditionally had to choose between deploying persistent desktops and non-persistent desktops. And while persistent desktops provide end users with a personalized desktop experience, they also come at a higher cost. Conversely while non-persistent desktops help drive down costs for IT, they do nothing to support end users with a customized experience. This has led many to look for a middle ground--a truly “stateless” desktop that addresses both the needs of IT to drive down costs as well as the requirements of end users for a better desktop experience. This “stateless” desktop is the way forward--and UEM is uniquely positioned to deliver this solution to customers across virtual and cloud hosted environments.

Need of UEM

The way people work has changed. No longer is your workforce tied to one device in one location. Today, workers need to be productive from anywhere, anytime, driving IT to support multiple devices and provide flexible access to data, apps and services. But IT organizations still struggle balancing personalized access while keeping the enterprise secure. What apps and services do workers need? What printers should they have access to? What resources should be blocked if they are on an unsecure public network? 

IT teams typically handle these issues manually, often relying on scripts that overload the team and prevent them from working on more strategic projects. As a result, many companies suffer from:

• Delays in getting people access to the digital resources they need due to too many manual processes to perform routine tasks
• Inadequate definition and enforcement of access policies—especially restriction of privileges when users work from non-secure devices, locations or access points
• Valuable IT staff time excessively consumed by routine administration ? Stalled virtual desktop infrastructure projects that are simply too unwieldy to manage
• Limited visibility into who is accessing which apps and data and when

These problems impact the business in the form of lost productivity, security risks, poor compliance, user frustration, high IT OpEx and compromised business performance for the workers.

A Better Way Forward

To achieve a truly stateless desktop, IT needs the tools to deliver a personalized experience to a non-persistent desktop. User Environment Manager enables IT to do just that. User Environment Manager allows IT to deliver a consistent and personalized workspace experience to end users across devices and locations. It simplifies persona management and helps organizations drive down operational expenses in the process.

How It Works

User Environment Manager Clients are installed on RDS or VDI hosts, and devices such as desktops and laptops. Clients are enabled and configured through central GPOs in Active Directory that IT sets up with User Environment Manager. IT can then set up policies and settings using the management console. When a user logs onto their laptop or virtual desktop for example, policy settings such as network and printer mappings and shortcuts are automatically configured according to the set policy. IT can even create dynamic contextual policies based on conditional statements from the management console. Application settings can also be predefined such that when a user opens up an application, the application configuration settings are automatically configured for quick application access. Settings can be applied to published applications and virtual desktops, such as VMware Horizon 6, RDSH desktops and apps, or Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop.

Benefits

Centralized and Simplified User Environment Management User Environment Manager provides IT with a robust solution for profile and persona management. Simple by design, this solution can easily be managed without scripting or complex user interfaces. And customers can get started with very little investment in infrastructure.

Windows OS agnostic profile solution simply requires one central configuration share and one network folder per user. Consistent and Personalized End-User Experience with User Environment Manager, IT can deliver a consistent and personalized user experience for end users to maximize productivity. End users are productive because of a consistent feel to their workspace.

Contextual policies for user persona management ensure that IT can map policy settings that tie directly to the end user’s device and location. This allows IT to respond to rapidly changing business dynamics.

Enterprise-Grade Scalability with User Environment Manager, IT can quickly and cost-effectively scale to support over a hundred thousand end users across virtual, physical and cloud-hosted environments. IT can add or remove profile and personalization services across the organization as required, to better respond to changes in the workforce and the overall business.

Context awareness solution detects and adapts automatically to real-time conditions such as location, wireless action points, time, device identity and more for granular access control and optimized workspace.

Use Cases

Customers can use User Environment Manager to manage virtual, physical, and cloud-hosted environments. A typical use case could be a user accessing their applications on their physical laptop while traveling. That user also has access to use a virtual desktop when in the office. As soon as the user logs into the virtual desktop, the application settings are applied as if the user was still working on their physical laptop. IT can also set up dynamic policy to adjust based on triggers, such as network location. If that user has to have different predefined, non-default settings because they are accessing applications from a physical laptop in an unsecured location, IT can set up a dynamic policy. Other implementations of User Environment Manager can also be applied, such as policies that follow the user from published application to virtual desktop