By Jason Mattox, CTO, Liquidware
If the recent pandemic has reinforced
anything for us at Liquidware, it's to listen to your customers! At the onset,
in early March, of organizations realizing they needed to prepare for sending a
large proportion - if not all - of their workforce to work from home,
Liquidware was inundated with calls from both customers and prospects asking
how we could facilitate a "burst scale" workspace for these users. During the
ensuing weeks and months, we listened to our customers and partners and worked
diligently on helping them to provide a user experience that equalled, or was
better than, the one their users had back in the office. Utilizing our
solutions to rapidly migrate users to either a cloud-based workspace or to
their own device at home, our customers benefited from their investment in our
solutions to facilitate a new way of working for many.
We've had many discussions providing
guidance to our customers on the best approach for facilitating a work from
home strategy and, based on some of those discussions, we produced a number of
assets to help any company faced with the dilemma of how to best provision
workspaces remotely for their employees. You can find them all here: https://www.liquidware.com/solutions/desktop-disaster-recovery/wfh
One area that we have been most proactive
in is developing our Stratusphere UX monitoring and diagnostics solution. As
always with Liquidware, we have introduced some industry-first "must-have"
features that have enabled organizations to ensure not only user experience is
maintained, but also productivity. Stratusphere UX provides unprecedented
visibility in three key areas for a work from home scenario: 1. Are you users
connected; 2. Are they operational; and 3. Are they productive?
The latest version of Stratusphere UX that
shipped in July - version 6.1.5 - provides key "First Mile" metrics, such as an
expanded set of Wi-Fi metrics for troubleshooting a user's home connection.
These metrics include access point signal strength, access point distance and connection
speed, as well as support for mesh networks. The pandemic forced organizations
to rapidly launch work from home options and these metrics are now highlighted
in the Advanced Inspectors, Dashboards and SpotChecks within Stratusphere UX to
identify these first mile performance issues more easily. Organizations are now
assured that the technologies their workers rely upon are responsive and
support work from home seamlessly. In turn this reduces IT support overheads
and increases user productivity.
Another unique feature in Stratusphere UX
is Process Optimization. This feature allows users to
raise or lower the priority of applications and processes. With expanded
metrics showing the actions of Process Optimization, administrators can now
easily terminate or adjust noisy applications or "bad actors," therefore
further optimizing and securing the user experience. Memory savings are also
shown as Process Optimization tracks idle processes and reclaims unused memory,
reflecting hard dollar savings. For one customer, it enabled them to increase
their PC refresh cycle from four to five years purely from the efficiency
derived from Stratusphere UX Process Optimization.
These new features were extremely well
received by our customers and, in fact, accelerated a very large call center
order that under normal circumstances would have taken months to close.
However, as these features proved critical to this particular customer to
maintain user productivity in a work from home environment, the customer placed
the order within a matter of a few weeks!
We've also not been idle with our user
environment management and application layering solutions, ProfileUnity and
FlexApp. We released version 6.8.3 earlier this year and in June issued r2. A
quick summary of the new features in both products is below:
- Seamless FlexApp compatibility with FSLogix
- Enhanced Windows 10 Multi-session OS support
(WVD)
- FlexApp speed improvements on launch from cloud
- New Microsoft App-V and MSIX "Convert-to-FlexApp"
features
- Security hardening (client)
- r2
- VHDX support for FlexApp and ProfileDisk
- Bug fixes, FlexApp, File Extensions, etc.
- Updated FlexApp filter driver for speed and
compatibility
- Hourly billing for AWS
- FlexApp and base image runtime installer tool
for C++ runtimes and .NET frameworks
In speaking with a customer that recently deployed our
adaptive workspace management solutions for his AWS WorkSpaces environment, it
was encouraging to hear how Liquidware is an integral part of his management
stack. Specifically, he noted that, "Stratusphere UX provides a great deal of
information and gives us enterprise-grade troubleshooting and monitoring." In
respect of FlexApp, he likes the ability
to change an app footprint on each AWS WorkSpaces without impacting the users -
"to push out an app across a broad group and deliver across multiple
end-points, FlexApp is an amazing solution." You can read the full case study
here: https://www.liquidware.com/content/pdf/documents/customers/Liquidware-Customer-Naviga.pdf
While we're not sponsoring the
virtual VMworld this year, we are at many of the industry virtual events and
we're always on social media, conference platforms and just a phone call away
if you need us, stay safe and well!
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About the Author
Jason Mattox is well-known in the virtualization community for his world-class knowledge and leadership in end user computing. In his role as CTO, Jason actively drives product development and product roadmaps for the company.