In a word.....price. AppSense is fantastic, but gratuitously expensive for us. They don't do non-profit discounts either. But managing profiles (particularly mandatory ones) with it is an absolute dream. You archive out registry settings to separate files for each application, so, for example, if Outlook goes west, just delete the files that provide Outlook settings and you're good. There's also the control feature that lets you "block" any buttons or keystrokes, you can "self-heal" registry settings or processes, and perform any amount of triggered execution of files, drive mappings, printer mappings and stuff like that. Version 8 is even better, as it can do lots of other stuff such as map certain drives when applications are launched, rather than do it all at logon and drag out the login process. And that's not counting the application management and performance management agents as well, which both did an excellent job.
CPM is obviously much cheaper for us, but I was actually quite impressed with it. It seems to leave out most of the profile bloat and just lets you specify files, folders and Registry settings manually if you find they are being lost when the profile is saved. It also lets you specify a "base" profile for each user, and can optionally override any local or domain-defined profiles that already exist. I still get odd profile issues, but nowhere near as many as with standard Windows profiles. However, the stuff we lost with AppSense means that we've had to vastly increase the amount of GPOs and Citrix policies that we use, so we still have a bit of a convoluted logon. In a nutshell, if you can afford it, go with AppSense. It's an "everything under one roof" solution, and some of the things you can do with it are brilliant. For instance, if we restarted the Exchange information Store during the day (which we don't do often, to be fair) we used to get about a hundred phone calls from users who had noticed the "disconnected" message in Outlook's status bar. With AppSense, I actually hid the button from the users' interface, and hey presto! no more phone calls. Feel free to fire me any questions off-list if you want. Cheers, On 19 July 2010 20:48, Sean Martin <[email protected]> wrote: > For James Rankin > > James, > > You mentioned switching from AppSense to CPM. Can you elaborate on why you > made the switch? We're currently looking at both CPM and AppSense and based > solely on Citrix Consulting's feedback, we are leaning towards AppSense > because they indicated it may be easier to manage in our environment. We > have yet to evaluate the product for ourselves. We have a fairly large > Citrix environment (140 servers split between 8 application silos) and have > been dealing with a wide variety of profile issues for awhile. > > Any feedback you can provide would be appreciated. > > - Sean > > > ======================================= > > I've been through the hell of Windows roaming profiles. We used AppSense > with mandatory profiles which was vastly better, we have now moved on to > using Citrix Profile Management (which integrates nicely as it uses GPOs to > deploy) and it is much better than Windows profile handling. In fact, I'd go > so far as to say MS could learn a lot about profile handling by looking at > CPM. We haven't had more than two corrupted profiles since we went live > three months ago. In the windws-onlydays, we'd get that many per day. > - Show quoted text - > > > > > > -- "On two occasions...I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
