AppSense Ltd., the leading provider of user environment management solutions for the enterprise, announced today at VMworld its new, 8.0 version of AppSense Environment Manager. The only enterprise solution that enables standardized virtual desktop environments to be fully – and automatically – personalized, AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 accelerates virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) adoption by rapidly configuring desktops and applications with a user’s personal and policy settings without administrator intervention and independent of virtualization technology.

By allowing companies to apply both personal and policy attributes without complex profile management or labor intensive scripting, AppSense Environment Manager enables IT staff to provide users with personalized desktop environments quickly and painlessly. For instance, with Environment Manager 8.0, IT can seamlessly move users from physical to virtual desktops or from one operating system to another, while ensuring that each user’s personal settings, shortcuts, toolbars, and user-specific corporate policies are automatically migrated to the new environment.

To manage user environments in the past, many companies have used a combination of cumbersome, multi-vendor profile and scripting products. This is not only incredibly time-consuming, it also drives up IT costs and is nearly impossible to manage on a large scale.

“If IT can’t efficiently personalize desktops for all users, then the promise of enterprise-wide VDI implementation will never be fulfilled,” said Charles Sharland, CEO of AppSense. “With Environment Manager 8.0, we make it easy for IT to manage all aspects of the user independently of the desktop and application delivery mechanism, thus enabling true standardization of the corporate desktop and all the cost and management saving that provides. Not only does this solution solidify AppSense’s leadership in the user environment management space, it also meets a critical VDI need by giving IT the simplicity they require to manage vast configurations, while providing users the personalization they must have in order for large-scale VDI to succeed.”

“Once virtualization touches the end user, it’s critical to gain acceptance, to make the end-user experience a positive one,” said Michael Rose, Research Analyst at IDC. “AppSense offers a unique solution that makes that happen – one that easily scales to thousands of users in large enterprise-wide environments while also working with multiple VDI technologies."

AppSense Environment Manager is used in many organizations around the world to provide policy and personalization management across multiple delivery technologies. One such company is San Diego-based EMB America, actuarial consultants specializing in property and casualty insurance. “Through VDI, our users connect into virtual pools of machines. Users don’t necessarily know which machine they are connecting into and they really don’t need to know, because we have standardized these desktops. That was the big push for AppSense products. In order to provide a normal desktop experience, each user had to set his/her user profile settings every time they logged into a new machine - a huge waste of time,” says Greg Matuskovic, IT Director for EMB America. “With AppSense, everyone now has a consistent and personal experience across all pooled machines without extensive IT burden. All our users are happy and more productive. We now run AppSense on all the virtual machines we have.”