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This was one of my favorite moments on the expo floor at Citrix Synergy 2013 this week in Anaheim. I took an important client down to spend some time with Pierre and team from Norskale to do a deep dive into their VUEM product.

Norskale VUEM Booth at Synergy

We have been getting stellar results with this product at our client sites and thought it would be perfect for this particular environment. This client has a widely dispersed national company with a large PC desktop footprint and a well established XenApp and XenDesktop deployment that is rapidly growing.

We went through the range features in the framework, first from the user viewpoint by logging in and loading a complex set of user settings and modifying them in real time. We looked at various use cases of users populating their own Start Menus and Desktop from an admin provided list of apps, how users can easily assign their own printers and set their own defaults. We then looked into the admin console and the details of the integration with MS Roaming Profiles and Citrix Universal Profile Manager, i.e. how to implement folder redirection and VUEM provided default settings to exclude files that cause known issues with common apps such as Chrome. We examined the SQL backend and reviewed the architecture for placing the broker services across multiple locations and options for SQL clustering and mirroring. We went through the clever CPU and Memory optimizations that VUEM provides (which can increase scalability by 25%) and talked at length about integrating this framework into an existing login script/GPO based environment. The discussion got deeper and deeper and more and more technical and went on for until they closed the expo floor.

It was a great session and when it was all over I turned to my client and asked what he thought. He said, and I quote, “You had me at Login!”. While I am used to it, a sub 15 second login time is a major revelation (and productivity boost) for most organizations.

He went on to explain that with all the requirements of their environment from security, to drive mappings, to user and machine policies, that login times were often well over a minute and sometimes quite a bit more. While they value and need all these other great features, just giving the users all the settings with a smoking fast login was enough!

VUEM is definitely a fantastic product for managing your User Environment whether it is physical, virtual or, both. It is my personal “Best in Show” this year from Synergy. If you are interested in learning more, contact us for a demo