Whitepaper About User Profile Management

As application delivery scenarios grow increasingly complex, user profile management becomes even more of an issue than in times of server-based computing.There is a whole market focussing on managing a user’s environment. One aspect of these efforts is to handle a user’s personal settings which sepagoPROFILE solely concentrates on.

Unfortunately, there are still folks thinking that the traditional methods suffice to solve the issues which are caused by the limitations of Windows user profiles. Due to this, I initiated the writing of this whitepaper to cover in depth the subject of user profiles and to reveal the pitfalls encountered in traditional handling of profiles. An exerpt from the Management Summary of the whitepaper is included below.

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The current version of the whitepaper is available here as well as subsequent revisions of the document. They will be announced in this blog. Updates will be made available here.

Management Summary (excerpt from the document)

This technical whitepaper describes the concepts behind Windows user profiles and explains common pitfalls and how to avoid them – both with and without the profile optimization solution sepagoPROFILE. User profiles store application and configuration data for individual users. Contrary to popular belief, this data is business critical; since each user’s familiar working environment is contained within his or her profile. Thus, successfully managing this kind of data is essential for any enterprise, because corrupted or lost personal settings cause expensive help desk calls and effectively prevent the user from working. Instead of providing several different mechanisms to resolve the challenges of user profile management, sepagoPROFILE overcomes the inherent limitations of Windows user profiles by replacing the classic process of loading and storing personal settings with an advanced approach of merging settings from several devices and sessions. sepagoPROFILE not only supports terminal servers, but also client operating systems. As today’s application delivery methods become more and more heterogeneous it is more important than ever to provide one single set of personal settings on any device via any delivery method.

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I’d like to thank my colleagues Helge Klein, Clemens Geiler, Marc Schröter and Marcel Meurer for their valuable input of facts and feedback concerning the whitepaper.