Some best practices to take care of with RES PowerFuse

Some best practices for RES PowerFuse:

1. To prevent a denial of access when opening the RES PowerFuse Management Console, create a seperate account, make it member of the build-in full Technical Manager role.

Logon to the domain with this special account (only in case of emergency) and try to open the Management Console.

Note: when migrating from one Windows domain to another (let’s say ‘Domain A’ to ‘Domain B’), make sure you give an account from ‘Domain’ B a Technical Manager role before switching the default domain to ‘Domain B’ in the RES PowerFuse Management Console.

2. When using ‘Workspace Containers’, there’s a possibility a user is denied access to the RES PowerFuse workspace, due to the fact there are no valid Workspace Containers for this specific based on the access control. The following message appears:

To prevent this from happening, create one Workspace Container (for example named “All”)

Select “Include all computers”

and finally make sure “Will be accessible for all users” is configured at the Access Control tab

It really does not have any effect on the user’s workspace, but it will only grant the users access, even there’s no access control on all other workspace containers.

3. Sometimes it’s unclear if the issue you’re troubleshooting has something to do with the created content, is behaviour by design of RES PowerFuse or an actual ‘bug’ in the software. There’s one easy step to determine if it’s content related. Create a clean new RES PowerFuse database and connect with the RES PowerFuse Management Console to this ‘clean’ database. This only applies for the machine where you actually connect to the new database through the RES PowerFuse Management Console, all other machines are still connecting to the original database

Use the “Create” button from the RES PowerFuse Management Console at RES PowerFuse Setup -> Datastore -> Connection

You can use Building Blocks to get content from the existing database to the clean one, to test specific content.

4. When using ‘Home Directory Maintenance’, keep in mind there’s one default enabled global rule, which copies everything from the toplevel folder and below, based on date/time stamp.

When planning to use access control here, disable the default rule and create per folder new rules. Do not forget to create a rule for the ‘pwrmenu’ and ‘windows’ folder first. These folders are part of the RES PowerFuse architecture and required.

5. The logon process is one of the most time consuming process in a Windows environment. It’s always a challenge to keep the logon time as short as possible, otherwise users are going to complain.

Can RES PowerFuse speedup the logon process? no it can’t.

But there are some conciderations to take, which will keep the logon process optimized. For example Microsoft PowerPoint. Let’s say 50% of the users are using Micrsoft PowerPoint. When setting some User Registry Settings for Microsoft PowerPoint (via PowerLaunch -> User Registry), everybody will receive these settings regardless if they have access control on the Microsoft PowerPoint application. Ofcourse you can set some access control on the specific User Registry entry, but it will increase administration here.

A better solution is to bind the User Registry Settings to the Microsoft PowerPoint application (via Application Properties -> Configuration -> PowerLaunch).

Now the settings are applied when Microsoft PowerPoint is started only for users which are granted access to the application. The settings are not loaded during logon anymore. Eventually it will reduce the logon time.

Ofcourse there are much more conciderations to take when building an environment with RES PowerFuse. The five ones in this article are easy quick wins to take.