VMware has announced news about the coming release of User Environment Manager 9.0! After last year’s acquisition of Immidio the first real changes are becoming visible in User Environment Manager 9.0. This blog will guide you through the key changes and new features.
Horizon Cloud Manager
With the release User Environment Manager 9, VMware has made the first step to cloud based management. In order to achieve this, the engine of ‘Project Astro’ delivers the new interface to User Environment Manager 9. Currently, not all Management Console features are migrated in this release, so it’s a hybrid situation at the moment.
Application Authorization
You can use this feature to specify which users can run particular applications in your organization. Another cool feature: it is fully compatible with VMware App Volumes. For example, it isn’t necessary to manage the security aspects for you can now integrate this with Application Authorization. Black- and whitelist applications are based on configured paths and executables.
Horizon 7 Smart Policy
A highly requested feature was applied policies based on different conditions between different locations and devices. Horizon 7 Smart Policies now brings contextually aware, fine-grained control of client-side features. IT can selectively enable or disable features like clipboard redirection, USB, printing, and client drive redirection. All of this can be enforced based (for example) on location, named user, client mac address and even any given VDI pool.
ThinApp Customizations
In mixed environments seamless roaming of user settings between ThinApped applications and locally installed applications were always a pain. With this new release seamless roaming with ThinApp 5.2 (or higher) has been improved. It’s now even possible to roam your Microsoft Outlook signature without any issues!!
Control Personal Data
Using Microsoft Group Policies for Folder Redirection was always the best practice until now. User Environment Manager 9.0 brings the Folder Redirection extension to the Management Console, thus offering this functionality from the same interface without the need of using the traditional Group Policy interface.
In my opinion, the User Environment Manager Management Console is now a fully Single Pane of Glass for simplifying end-user profile management. I’m looking forward to get some hands-on time with User Environment Manager 9.0 when it’s officially released!
