Innovation and making progress! Liquidware – you’ve heard about them before, right?

Even though I’m no longer employed by Liquidware, I still very much like the technology and people involved. In today’s post, I want to highlight some of the major product updates they have launched throughout the last couple of months – it’s pretty impressive. If you are going to be at E2EVC (Amsterdam) next week, make sure to stop by their session, I’ve picked up a glimpse and it’s going to be good. It’s on Saturday at 10:50 and goes by the session name: Go Hybrid. Applications, Profiles, and Data accessible via On-prem and Cloud. Presented by David Bieneman – Co-Founder and CEO of Liquidware.

During my time at LW, I was/we were regularly updated on what was going on from a technology/roadmap perspective. It goes without saying that I won’t be able to disclose any of that information today, having signed an NDA and all. However, I can tell you that based on what they have released up till now, there’s some really good stuff still to come. And knowing these guys a little now, I’m also confident that they have already added multiple new milestones to work towards.

Below you’ll find a couple of excerpts/highlights from their online documentation, product release maps and such. I’m sure you might be aware of some features and/or functionalities already, though I won’t be surprised if you’ll pick up some new information here and there as well.

ProfileUnity and FlexApp

As you may, or may not know, ProfileUnity (ProU) and FlexApp (FA) tightly integrate. In fact, I haven’t come across many customers that used the one without the other, which makes sense. ProU provides everything you need (and more) to be able to manage and support your enterprise workspaces/workloads and everything of importance to your users – while making life a little easier for your IT staff at the same time. It does this on-premises, in the cloud, or it can handle a combination of both just as easy. Next to that, the ability to create an abstraction layer of even the most complex applications by means of an application layer using FA, makes it an excellent add-on to ProU – both managed from the same console.

Have a look below…

1. ProfileUnity supports saving to Google Cloud Storage (GCS) for configuration files, license file, and portability. This removes the need for file shares and is mainly designed for desktops or RDS servers running on Google Cloud Platform.
2. ProfileUnity supports saving to Azure Blob Storage for configuration files, license file, and portability. This removes the need for file shares and is mainly designed for desktops or RDS servers running on Azure Cloud.
3. ProfileUnity supports saving to Amazon S3 storage for configuration files, license file, portability and the client install. This removes the need for file shares and is mainly designed for Amazon Workspaces or RDS Servers running on Amazon EC2.

Let me pause here for a minute…

This is pretty huge, right? All this is available TODAY! They started out with the S3 storage back in April, which is only two months ago, and added both Google and Azure in the weeks after. The latest ProU and FA release is v 6.7.7.6701, which was released on May 8th, 2018. They also publically announced future support for FlexApp as well.

Client-side improvements

Faster Logins

1. In slower Active Directory environments where querying group membership during login has been slow, logins are now faster. We now use the Windows local token for what groups the user is part of. This applies to group check filters and ProfileDisk VHD group checks.
2. In environments where WMI is corrupt or slow, this can slow down the login. ProfileUnity repairs WMI on boot and starts the WMI service. As a result, WMI is running before the user login occurs. ProfileUnity also pre-loads WMI computer-based filters into RAM before the user logs in

Faster Logoffs

1. Microsoft Edge rule was optimized.
2. VHD unmounts are faster than 6.7.0. This applies to ProfileDisk and FlexApp.
3. The File Associations module now supports default browser, PDF and other Windows defaults on Windows 10. The File Associations module also now supports RDSH where two users who are on the same OS at the same time can have different file associations.
4. Pinning modern apps to Windows 10 tiles and the taskbar is now supported.
5. Deleting modern apps from Windows 10 tiles and the taskbar is now supported.

Again, a lot has been done within a short timeframe.

FlexApp

Faster FlexApp

1. In some cases, FlexApp DIA playback can playback faster.
2. In some cases, FlexApp DIA Click-To-Layer shortcuts can be created faster.
3. FlexApp DIA shortcuts that users copy to their personal Start Menu, desktop, Windows 10 tiles and taskbar are removed at login if the FlexApp DIA assignment is removed from the user.
4. FlexApp DIA Click-to-Layer shortcuts that users copy to their Start Menu, desktop, Windows 10 tiles and taskbar are removed at login if the FlexApp DIA Click-to-Layer assignment is removed from the user.

Stratusphere

I only went back two months and focused on some of the major updates. Have a look here to browse through their list of additional optimizations and minor updates. At this point, I haven’t even looked at Straupshere. I’m afraid the post will become too long to read (TLTR). To keep things ‘easy’ and practical here’s a link to the Stratusphere Release Notes documentation.

Also, they have done some cool stuff around  Spectre and Meltdown as well. Check out the blog posts below:

1. Using Stratusphere UX to proactively manage Spectre and Meltdown efforts
2. Meltdown and Spectre – Minimize impact and avoid performance problems – How Stratusphere UX can help

I loved talking about Stratusphere, it can so much that I (almost without exception) had to make choices what to talk about, otherwise I simply didn’t have enough time during my deep (er) dive tech sessions and customer presentations. I often referred to it as being the swiss army knife of the Liquidware portfolio. The best thing is, you use what you need when you need it. You don’t have to collect all data, monitor every component, and so on, all the time. This way, you won’t be overwhelmed with too many details and data – unless you want to. It’s all up to you.

To finalize, here are some of their latest news announcements throughout the last few months…

1. Liquidware Integration with Amazon Workspaces
2. Liquidware strengthens DaaS appeal with new ability to save direct to object-based cloud storage
3. Unrivaled User Experience, Simple Migration with Liquidware & Citrix XenDesktop
4. Liquidware Unchains Enterprises from On-Prem to DaaS

Bas van Kaam

Field CTO EMEA by day, author by night @ Nerdio

Father of three, EMEA Field CTO @ Nerdio, Author of the book Van de Basis tot aan Meester in de Cloud, Co-author of the book Project Byte-Sized and Yuthor of the book: Inside Citrix – The FlexCast Management Architecture, over 500 blog posts and multiple (ultimate) cheat sheets/e-books. Public speaker, sport enthusiast­­­­­­­­: above-average runner, 3 x burpee-mile finisher and a former semiprofessional snooker player. IT community participant and initiator of the AVD User group Community world wide.