Yesterday at ‘RES Software Partner Focus’ the new release of PowerFuse was shown to the public. CTO Bob Janssen gave a short demonstration of the new features and the redesigned management console.
RES PowerFuse is a ‘user environment workspace manager’ and can be used for all Windows desktops. It create a unified desktop with central management, secures the desktop environment, optimizes performance (on shared environments like TS/XenApp), and many more.
In the new release of PowerFuse, called 2010, RES went back to basic and ask thereselve the question “Why did we start building this product?”
Eventually they realized it was mainly about three items. Content, context and security.
Applications, printers and settings (etc) are content which needs to be deliverd to users based on groups, location, role (etc), which is the context. And of course there’s a need for security.
The new managent console is mainly build around these three items (and two more), which makes it more intuitive to use. Using a ‘Outlook-pane / navigation control’ (you know what i mean when you see it) you’re able to navigate through the configuration of the product and optimize you’re environment.
I didn’t have any problems with the old interface, but I guess this would help me make my work easier. Yay 🙂
Something wich definitily will make my work easier is the ‘zero profile technology. In the previous versions of PowerFuse it was possible to save bits of a userprofile and forget about the rest using a mandatory profile. This is the way userprofiles are working the best, they’re fast and yet the user keeps his personal information.
But configuring these ‘user preferences’ is time consuming and specialized work. Not anymore, it’s solved…
All the administrator needs to do is check 1 checkbox, and the settings are save for each application. No need to determine the files or registry keys needed for the application. Less work for me, yay!
Another thing which consumes time, especially during design, are the global settings in the PowerFuse database. Altough PowerFuse 2008 (the ‘old’ version) introduced workspaces to seperate environments like laptops, workstations or citrix servers, the general settings where… well, general. Optimizing you’re CPU, memory or access balancing needs to be done right. But there really isn’t a general settings which applies to all situations. Well, this is solved in PowerFuse 2010. From now on you’re able to configure these settings per workspace. And the workspaces can be configures with ACL as well, which is very usefull in larger environments with multiple workspaces.
Something RES really wants, is to implement PowerFuse at more sites. The whole RES sales force was present and they where’nt shy, not at all 😉 But there are some technology driven factors as well.
Implementing PowerFuse can now be partially implemented, instead of a full solution which ’takes over’ your desktop environment. You’re able to choose the components you want to implement, and even implement seperate components partially. For instance the shortcuts can be added to the present shortcuts, instead of replacing them. Unfortunately the license model isn’t changed, so you pay the full price even when you don’t use all features of it.
Last thing which is showed is all about ‘desktop transformation’ (the partially implementing of compenents is part of this as well). RES delivers a component, the desktop sampler, which analyses the user actions, content and context. The data is collected and can be analysed in the ‘workspace designer’ which not only gives advise about how to implement the content (based on context), but the effect on the current environment as well. Really cool and this is really valuable in all implementations.
And further;
– Folder synchronisation is available (for offline use);
– Upgrading from 2008 to 2010 is non-intrusive (or so they say).
On the 16th of February 2010 RES PowerFuse 2010 is released.
Ingmar Verheij
Nederlands 
English