Profile management ensures that the user’s personal settings are applied to the user’s virtual desktop and applications, regardless of the location and end point device.

Profile management is enabled through a profile optimization service that provides an easy, reliable way for managing these settings in Windows environments to ensure a consistent experience by maintaining a single profile that follows the user. It auto-consolidates and optimizes user profiles to minimize management and storage requirements and requires minimal administration, support and infrastructure, while providing users with improved logon and logout.

Profile management is a feature available for XenApp Enterprise and Platinum editions and XenDesktop Advanced, Enterprise and Platinum editions.

Business challenges

In a virtualized world, where users can get to their desktops and applications from practically any location or device, you need to leverage “user profile” technology to ensure users get a consistent experience every time. When users log on to their virtual desktop or launch a virtual application, they want to see everything just as they left it, with their own personal settings, shortcuts, toolbars, templates, desktop wallpapers and favorites. The more complex and varied the user access scenarios, the more challenging it becomes for IT to manage these user profiles.

The most common challenges that impact the user experience and that administrators have to address when managing user profiles are:

• Last writer wins – When users work on more than one physical or virtual device, their individual personal settings may be overwritten in a seemingly random manner when they log off.
• Profile bloat and logon speed – Profile bloat creates unwieldy growth in user profiles and resulting storage and management issues. Typically during logon Windows copies the user’s roaming profile over the network down to the local machine. Logon time is prolonged by the time it takes to transfer the whole profile over the network. The larger the profiles are and the more files they contain the slower the logons will be.

Key benefits of using Profile management

• Consistent Experience: Increases user satisfaction and improves productivity — Reliable roaming experience: Ensures that personal settings, documents, shortcuts, templates, desktop wallpapers, cookies and favorites always follow the user across different Windows environments on any device. — Faster logon times: Provides the ability to control and reduce the profile size, which improves the logon times.
• Better Management: Reduces administrative burden — Inclusion by default: By default all settings are captured, reducing the amount of time and effort spent in identifying what should be captured in a profile.  Administrators only need to focus on the items to be excluded from a profile, such as conflicting settings, files or folders that bloat the profile. — Profile size control: Enables administrators to only include specific files and folders or exclude unnecessary ones that account for tens or hundreds of megabytes, minimizing the amount of data being managed and stored in the profile and decreasing network overhead. — Robust profiles: Automatically detects and stores all modified profile settings in the registry and file system and can be configured to capture any kind of registry and file system modification within the profile. Prevents the unintentional overwriting of user profiles by using built-in logic to determine which data should be kept. — Extended synchronization: Allows administrators to synchronize files and folders for poor-performing applications that do not store user-related content within the user profile but somewhere on the device hard disk. — Detailed reports: Logs detailed information on all actions being performed in an easy to read and understandable format, simplifying the troubleshooting and analysis process. — Easy to implement and simple to maintain: Enables administrators to automatically migrate existing user settings and choose at a granular level which profile information to keep or discard. It runs as a system service, and does not require any additional servers, services, or databases or changes to logon scripts.