Today Microsoft announced the release of version 1.0 of its User Environment Management (UEM) solution User Experience Virtualization, also known as UE-V. UE-V together with App-V 5.0 was first announced a public beta in April this year.
Up until now Microsoft’s solution for user environment management was called User Profile Virtualization, which was actually a combination of Roaming Profiles and Folder redirection. This solution isn’t very suitable though in environments where users access traditional desktops, terminal servers, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and other devices using the same account. Therefore Microsoft partners like Citrix, Appsense, Immidio, Liquidware Labs, Quest, Res Software and others filled in this gap by providing UEM solutions. Most of them still have far more superior features compared to UE-V, but many customers can be satisfied with the UE-V solution.
While the roaming profiles with folder redirection solution the UE-V solution will apply settings when applications are opened, and save that settings when the applications is closed, in contradiction to the User Profile Virtualization which loads settings at logon and saves them at logoff. For UE-V to work another agent needs to be deployed. Settings location templates, which are XML based are used to tell the agent which applications should store their roaming information from the file system and registry to a network location. Templates can be generated with the UE-V generator tool.
More technical information about UE-V can be found at this post at the Microsoft Springboard Series Blog and in the UE-V deployment white paper.
UE-V 1.0 and App-V 5.0 will be part of a new version of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2012, which is available for Software Assurance (SA) users.