WHAT ON EARTH AM I DOING?

It’s the typical IT-challenge: balancing the needs of individual users with the centralized management control required by IT administrators. Tools like Active Directory® and Group Policies simply don’t deliver when it comes to giving end users the fine-tuning they need. As an IT professional, too much of your time is consumed by requests for changes to user configurations. RES PowerFuse solves this problem by providing IT administrators the control they need to manage and monitor the Windows environment, while enabling the desktop personalization that users want – anywhere, anytime. Take a look at these frequent and all too familiar problems and discover how RES PowerFuse eliminates them 1 by 1.

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	Fighting fires versus managing?

Today’s management tools were designed to address “one-size-fits-all” situations. But as soon as you want to give end users more personalized configurations, the environment is often inadvertently and negatively impacted. Print jobs fail. Data security is compromised. Applications don’t launch. In short, users lose valuable time while IT staff identifies the cause of the problem.
Stable environment, productive users
RES PowerFuse decouples the Windows operating environment from the application delivery methodology and the underlying hardware. Now you can mask changes in technology on the back end while providing a unified workspace or desktop on the front end. Users are productive and happy because the environment is more stable and reliable. Plus, users have a consistent desktop regardless of hardware and location. This helps IT staff simplify the management of their Windows infrastructure.

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Today’s users are mobile and they may be accessing your environment from anywhere using a variety of devices. Frequently, companies turn to “roaming profiles” containing specific user settings to enable user mobility. Unfortunately, user profiles are often corrupted unnecessarily which results in a loss of productivity for both IT and users. This means another call to IT to reset the profile and downtime for the user while they wait. Business is impacted as this scenario occurs too many times.
The settings follow the end user, anytime and anyplace
No longer does IT have to worry about profile management to enable user mobility. Nor does IT have to worry about corrupted profiles or compromised security when users are given elevated rights in order to continue working. RES PowerFuse solves the challenges associated with user settings and profiles once and for all. RES PowerFuse gives end users their own personal working environment, anytime and anyplace. Regardless of location, operating system, hardware. And without long logon and logoff procedures.

Delivering personalized workspaces and user configurations with tools like Active Directory and Group Policies can be a nightmare. A simple policy change can impact inherited rights of dependent policies that can negatively impact other users. Custom scripts are often written to address exceptions and to avoid policy complications. Neither approach is efficient. Neither approach scales across the organization.
Central control + personalized service
RES PowerFuse does away with routine tasks – tasks that often fail to deliver the desired result. Personal user profiles can be created quickly and easily from a central console, so that the system ‘almost automatically’ offers access to the correct applications. And helps in other ways too…by selecting the nearest printer, for instance.

Using roaming profiles in combination with custom scripts takes up a lot of bandwidth while they traverse the network to enable a user’s session. This slows down performance. Complex profiles required to enable mobile users or access to special applications take even longer. It is not unheard of for profiles to grow in size in excess of hundreds of megabytes.
Starting work in no time
RES PowerFuse allows users to log on in mere seconds. Instead of sending and storing a profile as an ever growing file, the working environment with RES PowerFuse is dynamically constructed based on the configuration defined in the master console. Other profile data and user settings are applied at the time of need, for example when the user needs to print, access a file, or launch an application. This is called “just in time personalization.” This reduces log-on times and results in both better performance and improved user experience!

Traditional Group Policies work best in simple environments. Group policies and profiles were designed in a “one-to-many” concept, meaning that one size fits all. Neither approach was developed to accommodate environments consisting of mixed operating system, device and application delivery methodologies, not to mention varying hardware and mobile users. Defining and maintaining user profiles within this context is a never-ending nightmare.
Change environment settings and profiles with a single mouse click
Every end user must get a personalized computing environment at every workstation or laptop they use. This philosophy is the foundation of RES PowerFuse. Using a centralized management console, application settings and user profiles can be easily created and changed within seconds – complete with printer and other drivers as well as the correct registry settings. The entire environment can be configured to ensure uniformity across the infrastructure yet enable flexibility when needed to adapt to changing user needs.

Today, security comes with a price! Locking down the environment to increase security often penalizes end users who need more flexibility. Maintaining security settings that accommodate office workers, mobile workers, at-home workers using different computing devices across hybrid environments requires a different approach.
Safe, and flexible
With RES PowerFuse you can very simply indicate who is allowed to work where and with what. So access to certain applications or files/folders can be denied based on your company’s security policies. Controlling company data by precluding copying to external storage devices, like USB sticks, is now just a mouse click away. Lock down as much or as little as needed, define user workspaces that adapt to changing user requirements, and automatically monitor and audit everything, down to the individual user. RES PowerFuse enables security from within without compromising user flexibility.

Windows 2000®, Windows XP® and Windows Vista™ each have their own ways of implementing profiles, options and management-consoles – so fine-tuning at the end-user level can be a real challenge when you are working with different operating systems. Often maintaining these environments requires a lot of manual work and scripting to constantly fine-tune the configuration settings – both for the end user as well as for applications.
Unified Workspaces for IT and end users
RES PowerFuse provides a unified workspace for the end user regardless of the number of Windows operating systems in use in the environment. IT administrators now have a single view from the management console from which to manage user workspaces, regardless of the underlying Windows operating system.

Many organizations lack a centralized management framework that provides visibility to the entire Windows infrastructure. Nor do they have the ability to easily document changes at the end user, group, application or overall environment level. This makes it difficult to diagnose problems or to audit the environment for compliance purposes.
Automated documentation in the background
RES PowerFuse is self documenting. Now you have the visibility you need at any level and at any time. Need a single snapshot of a user’s configuration? Need insight into an application’s settings? Looking for comprehensive documentation of the entire environment to enable compliance? Look no further. RES PowerFuse automatically keeps track of the environment for you and instant reports are only a mouse click away.


	Safe, but static!


	Frustrated by on-going maintenance of user settings?


	Experiencing lengthy logons?


	More handyman than manager?