AppSense Environment Manger vs. Microsoft UE-V

Hi,

I have started to test Microsoft UE-V to see what the differences/ advantages are against AppSense Environment Manager.

Prerequisites:

EM: 

For a minimum configuration and tests you need an Active Directory and a server where you install a Microsoft SQL Server Express, EM Personalization Server and the EM Console. 

UE-V: 

You need an Active Directory and a fileserver where to save your settings and your settings templates. 

Conclusion:

So as you could see here the prerequisites are nearly the same except of the SQL Server.

Installation:

EM: 

The installation of the AppSense EM is very straight forward and documented good in the admin guides and the SQL Server Express 2008 R2 is included in the installation media. 

The installation on the client side is also straight forward and all prerequisites are also on the installation media.

UE-V:

The only thing to install on the server is the MDOP 2012 Group Policy Templates to configure UE-V via the Group Policy Management Console. As I have seen right now you could also deploy the UE-V agent via commandline and set the configuration so you do not need the Group Policy templates but it is so much easier to configure it with GPOs.

On the client side the only prerequisite is .NET Framework 4 or .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. 

Conclusion:

One big advantage of EM is the broader client support as you could install it from Windows XP and above as UE-V only supports Windows 7 and above. The downside is that you need an additional component which you also have to update and maintain as this is the SQL Server which is needed.

Configuration:

EM:

The first time configuration is documented on the AppSense site and there is also a Quick setup wizard for user personalization and some common application templates (Adobe Reader, Google Chrome, Lotus Notes, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Office 2003, 2007, 2010) which are configured for you. So after the installation you could go on and start with your tests shortly without so much knowledge about the Personalization Server.

UE-V:

The only thing you have to do is to install the agent and do some configuration via GPOs which should be done in about 5-10 minutes and then you are ready to start. There are only MS application pre-configured (Calc, IE 8,9,10, Office 2010, Lync 2010, Notepad, Wordpad and some desktop settings like Themes) which could be captured to your network share.

Conclusion: So for a test environment the configuration tasks are nearly the same for both products. In my point of view the AppSense environment will be a little more complex in a production environment but also more flexible.

Architecture/Design:

The main difference you see at the architectural side is that EM is working with a SQL database at the backend and UE-V is storing its settings on a fileshare. So if your company does not have a SQL server installed and you want to work with AppSense you have to install minimum two SQL Server for failover reasons, so this could be a point where EM loses against UE-V as nearly every company on the world has a fileserver so UE-V is always possible.

There is no management/configuration console on the UE-V side so no administrative overhead on the server side but the problem with that is if you want to reset the application states with UE-V you have to "powershell" something so not very comfortable especially for the user.

As the UE-V configuration is working with GPOs which is a very robust infrastructure since a decade you likely won't see any misconfigurations or problems with that. 

The personalization itself is stored in the SQL database but with the tool "Personalization Analysis" you could read/export/import all settings for the specified user which is perfect if you need to troubleshoot. As UE-V saves all settings in the .pkgx format which isn't readable from any software I know, so it is really hard to troubleshoot the personalized settings if a user has a problem.

As AppSense saves there settings in a SQL database there is a possibility to rollback the settings of an application to a state one day/week/month before to resolve some issues. On the UE-V side the only thing you could do is to reset the application to a pristine state but not to settings which was made before.

The application settings are written back to the fileshare/SQL database on application stop so both vendors working with the same triggers here so there is no need to logoff for an application setting.

Conclusion (Differences/Advantages):

At first I am much more experienced with EM than with UE-V and I only tested it for a project to find the differences of these solutions so if any of my information are incorrect, please give me a comment and I will change it.

One thing I have seen which is better done by AppSense is the sizing of the profiles if you configure it like best practices or as the templates from the Quick setup wizard. I have made a test with Office 2010 and changed something in Word and Excel and the AppSense profile of the whole Office suite was about 300kb. I have changed exactly the same with the default UE-V templates and the whole Office settings were about 14MB great so this about 47-times bigger than the AppSense profile. If there any optimizations it is ok but this shouldn't be the case with the default configured settings. The problem with this is that you will notice the 14MB if there are copied back on a new machine to get your settings.

Another one is the not readable file format (.pkgx) which isn't very good for troubleshooting purposes if you want to see why the application for the specific user isn't working correctly. You could only reset it to a pristine state and all customizations for the user are lost.

One big plus of the EM is the variety of the clients supported. As UE-V is only supported from Windows 7/Windows 2008 R2 up, EM is supported from Windows XP/Windows 2003 up. The next thing is that EM is officially supported from AppSense on Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop and on vmware View. I have not found any official statement on the Microsoft site but I am not 100 percent sure if you will get support when you have problem with UE-V on your XenDesktop Farm.

One good thing on UE-V is the template generator which is a very easy to use application where you could find out on which registry keys and folder your application stores the configuration. I am also using this right now for my EM tests as it is much easier as the AppSense Configuration Assistant.

The Migration Mode is a big plus for EM as there is a possibility to grab the settings of an existing application so you have not to start with clean settings when you start with a user virtualization product.

At the end I want to say that UE-V is a great product for the version 1.0 and I am looking forward to see the next versions but at the state of now AppSense EM is much more advanced product. I would say that at the present time I would recommend to implement EM and not UE-V.

So if you have any improvements or if you see any wrong facts give me a comment as I have only tested UE-V but have not worked in deep with it.

Best Regards,

Michael

P.S. Please note that English is my second language. I am trying my best here, but just in case you read an odd sounding sentence every now and then, I hope you will excuse me.