User Personalization: The New Frontier in Desktop Virtualization

When companies give laptops to their employees, they set various access policies. Some companies let their employees do what they want on these laptops, like install software, while other companies lock down their laptops so employees can only do work related items. I know people who have to carry two laptops, one corporate and one personal, while they travel so they can do personal things on the road.

When companies set these policies, they are forced to make a trade off between employee productivity and flexibility with data security and manageability. The more flexible IT is towards the user, the harder it is to manage the laptops. How much time does IT really want to spend on re-imaging laptops because users frequently mess them up? At the same time, users are working longer hours from remote locations, so IT needs to make sure the users are happy and productive. And if something goes wrong, users do not want to have to wait days before they can try out software that might help their work.

Now companies are planning to implement desktop virtualization, especially VDI, to reduce their cost in supporting laptops and desktops. However, they have not realized that they are just avoiding one problem by introducing another. Instead of managing physical machines, they will be managing a lot more virtual machine images.

When the MokaFive founding team was at Stanford looking at desktop virtualization trends, we realized that we needed to make sure the solution satisfied both the needs of the IT department as well as the needs of the end users. If the solution only makes one side happy, it will never be successful.

This is why we introduced a product called User Personalization in our new version 2.0. A new policy is added which allows IT to control whether an end user can or cannot personalize or customize the virtual machine image. If IT allows the user to change various Windows settings, install applications etc., on the image, IT controls the image - IT can update it, add new applications, etc. The changes in the base image and the customization done by the user are merged when the user boots up the image. If the user messes up, he just needs to revert all of his changes and go back to the base image. IT does not need to be involved at all.

By combining the User Personalization feature with the Targeting feature, we are providing a very powerful image management solution for desktop virtualization deployment. With v2.0, you can have one single Windows XP image targeted to different groups with different policies. And you can give a group more flexibility and another less. You can work on the next image release while everyone stays productive. When the release is ready, a few clicks in the management console and you get everyone updated.