Managing user personalization and profile settings is really challenging you have to deal
with complicated group policy management slow log on times and ancient roaming profile technology
that really just doesn't work and as your company grows and adds more users this
becomes an even harder problem that's where VMware Dynamic Environment Manager comes in
Dynamic Environment Manager is an incredibly powerful solution that allows it to deliver
a consistent and personalized experience to end users across physical virtual and cloud desktops
that means that you have a single easy to use solution to manage things such as admx based
settings environment settings application settings and printer mappings let me show you how it works
here you have the Dynamic Environment Manager console under the personalization tab I can manage
items such as applications and operating system settings while the user environment tab allows
you to manage a ton of other settings such as printers network drives shortcuts and so much more
as I mentioned before Dynamic Environment Manager is
really powerful which means that I can't show you everything it does in just one short demo
but I'm going to focus on just a handful of use cases so that you can get a feel for what it does
first let me show you how it helps me configure the desktop experience for the
ACME marketing department so I'm going to start by configuring a network drive
I'll select the drive letter and path and then set my conditions
now Dynamic Environment Manager has dynamic contextual policy management capabilities which
allow me to use conditions to control when and whether it performs certain actions now conditions
can be based on things such as active directory attributes device information or device state for
example if I wanted to I could map this network drive only when users are physically in the office
but in this case for demo purposes I've already created a condition set that includes the acme
marketing group in active directory this will make it easy for me to set policies during this demo
all right let's now set up a printer for the marketing department
I set the path I configure this printer as the default printer and then assign it to the group
let's move on over to configuring shortcuts I already have adobe acrobat configured as
a shortcut I have it set to place a shortcut on the desktop as well as a folder in the start menu
okay let's now do the same for the acme website
okay I'm all set with shortcuts I also want to add a file that will be placed on the desktop for
everyone in the marketing group so I'll click on create a file
add some information then I'll select the desktop folder where I want to copy the file in
and you can use this to add important files or folders to a user's device
Dynamic Environment Manager also lets me set the initial configuration of applications it includes
a tool called application profiler that makes this really easy let me switch on over to another
desktop that has the tool installed okay so in application profiler I'm going to select start
session and once I do that it presents me a list of programs that are currently installed on the
local device when I select notepad plus plus it launches the application and now I can define some
parameters that I want to configure for the app so I'll set the default directory file associations
and turn off auto update now when I close the app what's happening is in the background application
profiler has been tracking the impact that my changes have made to the registry
and the file system and then these changes that I just made are saved into some configuration files
so now I need to copy these configuration files into Dynamic Environment Manager once I copy the
changes over I click refresh you see the app now appears in the console with the predefined
settings that I just configured I'll also push this to the acme marketing group last
thing is the desktop wallpaper now right from the console you see how Dynamic Environment Manager
makes it easy to use standard admx templates to configure user and computer policies
and it makes it really easy by providing me exact information
on what effect this policy will have on the device when I configure it so I'll enable active desktop
and desktop wallpaper with the path for the wallpaper image now in this demo we're applying
this policy to a virtual desktop it's always going to have a network access so for our purposes using
an image on a network share works just fine so i'm all set on my initial desktop configuration
let's see how it looks for the end user so here Kristen Williams she logs into her virtual
desktop you'll notice the custom wallpaper has been applied desktop shortcuts have been set up
and her network drive has been configured the document that we copied over earlier is also
on her desktop with the printer that we just set up and if we launch notepad plus plus the
predefined settings have been applied to the app so Kristin gets a seamless user experience
Dynamic Environment Manager is invisible to her as an end user just like it should be
now that was a pretty standard use case for most organizations the second use case I want to cover
is how Dynamic Environment Manager can help me restrict what end users can do on their device
so let's move on back to the console and we'll configure some more admx based settings I'm going
to create a new policy called acme security and in it I'm going to configure a few security settings
now what's great about dynamic environment manager is that it gives me an easy to use
tool for configuring admx settings I can filter my view only to the admx templates
that I want to configure so first I'll disable access to the control panel
and within the console you'll notice here I can easily search for other settings that
i want to configure so I'll search for and prevent access to the command prompt
and the registry editor and then once I'm done the console makes it easy for me as an
admin to see exactly what I've configured
okay we'll save this and now let's take a look at what happens on Kristen's desktop
so when she launches the command prompt Kristen sees that her access has been
disabled the same goes for the registry so you see that Dynamic Environment Manager gives me
powerful yet easy to use options to restrict what end users can do on their device
all right let's now move to the third use case and this use case that I want to cover
is application blocking and that's going to allow it to enable or block applications from launching
on desktops now by default it's turned off but I'm going to turn it on to show you what happens
when i turn it on what happens is that only applications from the windows and program files
folders will be allowed to run so if I switch over to kristin's desktop when she tries to run an
app in her downloads folder it's going to be blocked from running but like I mentioned
earlier apps in the Windows and program files folders are going to work just fine
like the snipping tool that you see right now now if we wanted to fine-tune application blocking to
block apps that are in those folders well we need to create an explicit blocking rule let me show
you how back in the dynamic environment manager console i'll configure a policy to block the
snipping tool which was able to run earlier all iIhave to do is add the path for the tool and I'm
all set switching back over to Kristin's desktop if she tries to launch that app she is blocked
so you see how Dynamic Environment Manager gives me powerful options to further lock
down desktop and for you and IT this can really help with managing security for your desktop fleet
okay let's now cover our last use case our fourth one which is privilege elevation as you
know many apps these days they require local admin rights to install on a user's device
as an example we'll take a look at audacity kristin wants to use audacity to record audio
for a new marketing video but when she goes to install the apps since she doesn't have
admin rights she's prevented from doing so this is where Dynamic Environment Manager can help
back in the console I'm going to create a new privilege elevation rule for audacity
now you can create privilege elevation rules that elevate privileges based on a file hash
a software publisher or a path to a file or folder in this case I'm going to create a
publisher base rule that means that I'm going to be able to allow executables that are signed
with the same certificate to run regardless of where the executable is located on the device
once I select the audacity executable it actually reads the certificate information
and applies it to the policy let's now go back to Kristin's desktop now when she tries to launch
audacity the executable can run even though Kristin does not have local admin privileges
we've covered several different use cases in this demo you've seen how you can use dynamic
environment manager to deliver a personalized desktop experience for your end users now this
personalized experience which includes admin and user defined settings follows end users across
any device that they log into you've also seen how Dynamic Environment Manager helps you easily
restrict what end users can do on their device including blocking applications from launching
and allowing for privilege elevation for apps that require administrative rights
and Dynamic Environment Manager does all of this without any scripting any complex
ui or any complex back-end infrastructure that just requires a lot of administrative overhead
it's a great solution for profile management combining the ease of managing application
and persona settings with providing end users a personalized desktop experience across any
virtual physical and cloud-based windows desktop environment now like I said earlier
we were only able to scratch the surface of what Dynamic Environment Manager can do to learn more
i encourage you to get started with your free evaluation of VMware Dynamic Environment Manager