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Today VMware launched a new version of UEM. I am very pleased with some new features within this release and to be honest, I think there are a lot of UEM customers waiting for one or more of these features as well. In this blog post I will shortly describe the new features.
So what are these new features?
- Application Blocking
- Folder Redirection
- Horizon Policies
- ThinApp 5.2 support
- Secured approach
Other updates:
- Office 2016 Templates
- New Conditions
Application Blocking
As a consultant for different UEM implementations I many times had the question why UEM didn’t have any application blocking features like for example RES Workspace Manager did. This was really a highly desired function for UEM customers and I am very happy this is introduced in version 9.
First enable Application Blocking, because it is disabled by default:
Application Blocking – Global Configuration – Enable Application Blocking
After you enable Application Blocking you can set the desired rules for your environment:
Folder Redirection
Folder Redirection settings are now available in UEM. Before we had to set these, for example, with GPO’s. The big advantage in my opinion is that you can apply all kind of conditions and manage all your user settings in one tool and especially in the big companies, you don’t depend on the AD guys.
Horizon Policies
From Horizon 7 and later, you now have the capability to set PCoIP policies per user session. How cool and easy is that!!! You can create conditions for pool names, tags, endpoint location, and View name and IP information.
You can use Horizon Policies to dynamically control the system clipboard, client drive, USB access, printing capabilities, and bandwidth profiles for PCoIP connections.
ThinApp 5.2 support
UEM now fully integrates with ThinApp 5.2, meaning that you can personalize application settings and inject predefined settings as we already did with other application types with a single checkbox under DirectFlex settings.
Secured approach
Within previous versions of UEM, it could happen that users are logged on to their desktops while the UEM config share wasn’t available and as a result the configuration for the user within UEM wasn’t processed. For personalization this is one thing, but with the ability to have all user policies configured into UEM ADMX-based settings, it could happen that certain security settings weren’t applied. Basically you had two options to try to avoid this:
- Make your config share high available
- Use GPO’s for configuring user-related security settings.
The disadvantage of the latest, is that you again have two places where you manage you User Environment Settings.
Now with the version 9 release, by default the user gets logged off, in the case if the config share isn’t available. This behavior is adjustable within the UEM ADMX template.
To conclude this blog post, I am very happy with the new release of UEM and I think VMware did a great job with adding these new features. Looking at the different integration features, UEM will fit perfectly together with the other VMware products like View, App Volumes en ThinApp to dynamically control your user environment.
Please feel free to add your comments!