Throughout the years I have had the pleasure of visiting dozens of companies to talk about their ‘digital workspace’ challenges. Projects ranged from thousands of users/machines to just a few hundred. Some of these challenges were related to physical desktops, some to virtual, some were on-premises, some were cloud-based. I’ve worked for retail companies, financial, travel, in healthcare, etc. No matter their branch and/or size, they all dealt with the same types of issues.
The digital workspace
The world of virtual and physical workspaces can be fun, but also (very) complex. For example, nowadays, operating systems are being updated 3 to 4 times per year instead of once every two to three years like we were used to.
Applications run, and data is stored, both on-premises and in the cloud, Office 365 is probably one of the best examples of that, also not making life any easier. Applications often are or can be installed locally, they can be virtualized, consumed as a service, or layered – offering even more flexibility. In most cases, it will be a combination of all mentioned.
The same applies to the workspace itself, it can have many shapes and forms. It can be physical, virtual, on-premises, cloud-based, assigned statically to a user, or dynamically, meaning the user will get a different (clean) virtual machine each time he or she logs in, you can mix and match, etc. Simply put, a lot comes into play when designing and managing all these types of (digital) workspaces.
User experience is key
If that isn’t ‘bad’ enough, we have to deal with users who want to have the same user experience without having to worry about where they are, or on what type of device they are working at any particular time of the day.
Personal settings need to be retained, they need to roam, preferably offering the same look and feel, no matter what, and from an administrative point of view we would like to have this centrally managed if at all possible.
While the above offers a lot of options to ‘play’ with, unfortunately, it also gives us, the administrators, in particular, a ton challenges to deal with, and the occasional headaches that come with it.
Just think about the supporting software needed and administrative effort to make all this happen. Not to mention the various network, storage and compute configurations that come into play, though I’ll leave these out of scope for now.
Standing still is going backward
We’ve all heard the term ‘standing still is going backward’, which, anno 2018 applies to IT more than ever before. We cannot afford to not upgrade to the latest Windows 10 build, or Server 2016/2019, for that matter. We can postpone it, sure, but there comes a time that you will have to take the leap otherwise you’re workspaces/desktops (virtual. physical, on-prem, DaaS, etc.) will become unsupported, it’s that simple.
The same applies to more and more applications and workloads getting ‘cloudified’, it’s almost impossible to ignore. And why should you? It can potentially offer your business a lot of advantages. Technology shouldn’t be holding you back, that’s for sure.
With all this going on, the need for a straightforward, easy to understand and use, workspace/user environment management solution, is greater than ever. One solution set, offering you the ability to manage all of your digital workspaces, physical and virtual.
Preferably one that helps you in preventing repeatable tasks. Configure once, migrate many, is a term I’ve used in the past, and it’s more applicable now than it ever was before.
Enter Liquidware
I’ve written about them in the past, and I will continue to do so in the future. They offer a unique set of software products helping companies to eliminate most, if not all of the abovementioned workspace and user challenges.
The thing I like most is the flexibility they offer. For them, it doesn’t matter how many times Microsoft releases a new or updated version of Windows 10, for example. It’s a onetime purchase and onetime configuration. After that, your users’ personal (workspace) settings and data will follow them where ever they go, independent of device type, on-prem and in the cloud.
Using Liquidware ProfileUnity you can tailor your user’s workspaces as you feel fit. ProfileUnity provides you with hundreds of context-aware filters, allowing you to create multiple configurations applicable on a per user basis, to groups of users, or Active Directory OU’s, to name just a few options.
Cloud, you say?
Are you thinking about moving specific workloads/applications to the cloud? Considering DaaS or IaaS, perhaps combined with various other SaaS offerings? Hybrid? Not a problem.
Onboard your users of choice to cloud-based virtual desktops (DaaS, IaaS) using ProfileUnity’s built-in migration features which instantly transform legacy profiles on older OS versions to the latest versions, including Windows 10.
ProfileUnity helps to ensure no data is left behind with sophisticated user authored data migration to cloud-based storage or the storage of your choice.
ProfileUnity also offers multiple direct cloud-based storage integration options with all major players out there, like Amazon, Azure, Google, etc. From a technical perspective, you won’t have to worry about Windows Servers offering SMB shares (those are so 2017) to store your users profile data, departmental data, or application layers even. That’s all taken care of, again, a one-time configuration.
You could even take it one step further and combine ProfileUnity with FlexApp application layering (managed from the same console), and Stratusphere UX (user experience and infrastructure monitoring in the broadest sense of the word), a killer combo!
It doesn’t matter
If you want to keep using what you already have, because time and money have been spent, but you would still like to explore new technologies and innovative ways to help your user becoming (and staying) even more productive, than that’s perfectly fine as well.
The thing is, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, if some of your users are on-premises, while others are using DaaS, for example. They can even be moved back and forth, it’s up to you. The workspace will simply follow the user.
The only thing you do not want to do is to start from scratch each time Microsoft releases another update to their flagship OS, or when your users switch devices, or move from on-prem to the cloud, or from location a to b, and so on. Luckily, you don’t have to.
Concluding
All this (and I have plenty more to talk about in upcoming blog posts) make Liquidware a “one-time” investment, offering you the freedom of choice when it comes to your preferred platform and/or Operating System, or multiple combined.
Pricewise there isn’t much holding you back either. In fact, if you have a look their Essentials Bundle (ProfileUnity, FlexApp, and Stratusphere) it’s only a fraction of the costs when compared to the, for example, Citrix/VMware Platinum editions. This way you will have all your workspaces/desktops (and users) covered, virtual and physical, without any vendor lock-in whatsoever.
But perhaps even more importantly, it makes any future choices or changes seamless, without you having to worry about reconfiguring, or migrating your entire digital workspace, each and every time!
