Written by Thomas Koetzing at Saturday, 10 March 2007 | Article editor: Shawn Bass
In this article I will introduce a new profile solution - sepagoPROFILE. This product is focused in solving the profile problem in Terminalserver, Citrix environments - no extra gadgets. sepagoPROFILE is a very effective and easy to configure product. In short, I advice Microsoft or Citrix to acquire the product and integrate it in Longhorn Server "Profile Service" or Presentation Server.
About sepago sepago is a German Citrix Platinum Partner and Solution Advisor. Enterprise customers of sepago have Citrix environments with up to 32.000 users. During projects they had the need to solve profile issues for their customers and the reason for developing sepagoPROFILE.
sepagoPROFILE (sP) sepagoPROFILE works as most other solutions in the market by using a mandatory profile and applying and saving the user specific settings during logon or logoff. Configuring a mandatory profile for all users (possible through a group policie) is therfore the basis.
The hard of sepagoPROFILE is the sepagoPROFIEService that is installed on every Server. The service itself is programmed in C++, multithreaded and uses only a minimum of system resources. In this context multithreaded means high performance even during peak logon or logoff times. This results in very short times for the part of applying and saving the user specific settings (no logon or logoff script is involved)
The sepagoPROFILE MSI package is easy to deploy since there is not really something you have to configure (you can only change the default path) The installation itself is all you have to do on the Server side!
sepagoGroupPolicies It is very smart to use Microsoft group policies to make the needed profile settings and the first time that I saw someone else beside Microsoft to use the Software\Policies registry key. If you designed your Active Directory the right way you only need to configure the settings once and they are distributed throughout your hole farm
Just load the sepagoPROFILE ADM template to your GPO and make your sepagoPROFILE settings.
The only policy that should be configured (if not set, "%HomeDrive%%HomePath%\windows" will be used) is the "Path to the User settings". All other options are optional. By default only registries setting are managed by sepagoPROFILE but you can also synchronize files or folders. In addition the files or folders are compressed when synchronized.
Believe it or not that is all you have to do! By default the sepagoPROFILEService saves all user registry changes during the session. Certainly you can make exclusions of registry hives if you like. As a result no "RegShot" etc. utility is needed to find a specific registry key or value that needs to be saved. A new Application has been installed - sepagoPROFILE takes care of it.
Also sepagoPROFILE supports, personal certificates, Mouse- and Keyboard settings, ScreenSaver and Desktop backgrounds. Not supported right now are "Scancode Maps" Keyboard remaps.
sepagoPROFILEMigrate Still in "beta" but sepago works on a Profile Migration utility for easy migration from roaming profiles to sepagPROFILES. Simply point the tool to the profile share and the mandatory profile and add the user you want to migrate.
When the converter is started, then user files with the personal settings are created and can be used with the sepagoPROFILE.
sepagoPROFILE and virtualizing Applications Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP's) have asked Citrix for such a solution but sepago is already working on it. On what? On synchronizing users Application settings between remote- and streaming Applications! Such functionality would give users a great experience and will make Application settings transparent. Personally, I will keep an eye on that part of development…
support by sepago sepagoPROFILE comes with support by sepago and if you have any problems, then sepago uses GoToAssist to help you fix any possible issue with the product. That leaves me to the part, where I have to say that sepago sales sepagoPROFILE on concurrent user basis and in my opinion a bit too expensive. Licensing "Per Server" and with- or without Support is not available at the moment, so I'm hoping Citrix or Microsoft will buy the product from sepago ;-)
Summary Perfect solutions for profile management – deploy and forget! Fast deployment- and easy configuration of sepagoPROFILE through Microsoft group policies. Lightning fast Im- and Export of user specific settings through a local profile service. Only drawback is the licensing and price of sepagoPROFILE, a more appropriate price and "Per Server" licensing would make sepagoPROFILE THE profile solution not only for Terminalserver, Citrix Farms.
Advantages
Very easy installation and configuration
Autosave of all changes a user makes
File/Folder inclusion and registry exclusion.
Microsoft group policy integration - no extra GUI
Multithreaded profile service for fast logon/logoff
Fast deployment through MSI package
No scripting, SQL etc. Databases involved
Full supported solution by sepago GmbH
Disadvantages
Licensing price and model
No support for key remaps
Article update*
01.04.2007: sepago GmbH changed the licensing and publishes a trial version for sepagoPROFILE
hmmm Written by Gast on 2007-03-26 00:10:57Erinnert mich stark an Jumping Profiles, ist das gewollt oder zufällig ?
hmmmm2 Written by Gast on 2007-03-26 09:53:09wer lesen kann ist klar im vorteil
sP hat nichts damit zu tun, weil z.b. keine scripte genutzt werden
hmmmm3 Written by Guest on 2007-03-27 18:49:44Wieso Scripts? Ich meine dass bei Jumping Profiles nicht einmal etwas auf einem WTS installiert werden muss. Hat jemand (ich meine außer Thomas) dieses sepagoprofiles schon mal angeschaut? Grüße!
JP Written by thomas koetzing on 2007-03-27 20:03:17Also braucht JP nichts (weder scripts noch Dienste) und kann doch Benutzer Einstellungen speichern - It's magic! Soweit ich weiß werden ocx Dateien auf dem TS benötigt und das usrlogon.cmd muss auch angepsst werden, sowie... ein haufen Zeug.
sepago wollte mir noch eine 30 Tage Testversion senden, die ich hier zum Download bereitstellen werde.
hmmmm4 Written by Gast on 2007-03-28 22:59:52Hallo Thomas,
hast Du Dir JP mal angeschaut oder ist das alles nur "hörensagen"? Grüße
JP review Written by thomas koetzing on 2007-03-28 23:13:24Das ist im JP Produkt review von Wilco zu lesen...
TRU Written by Gast on 2007-04-24 16:09:55Mädels, ich habs ausprobiert und gleich bei meinem Chef die Kohle locker gemacht für sepagoPROFILES. Endlich keine Probleme mehr mit den sch... Profilen.
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