Zero Profiling Explained

One of the new features of RES PowerFuse 2010 is the Zero Profiling technology. The technology handles the personal settings of a user when using Mandatory, Roaming, or Local profiles. Of course companies want to get rid of roaming profiles because of the well known roaming profile issues of this profiling technology. As we all know, roaming profiles get corrupted, or grow so large, login times get compromised.

I guess you all read Paulina’s article about creating a mandatory profile in your environment, and a quick peek into zero profiling technology. This article dives a little deeper into the RES Software Zero Profiling technology, and especially, when to use which Mode.

Maybe you were already familiar with User Preferences in RES PowerFuse 2008. In RES PowerFuse 2010 we built in the ability to preserve application specific settings. When you dive some further in this technology you’ll notice these settings are saved in the %HOMEDRIVE%\pwrmenu\Userpref folder (remind that by default the pwrmenu folder is hidden)

When you take a better look at the contents of this folder you’ll notice there are a couple of types of files in this folder. I’ll explain them to you:
.upf: in this file type the global User Preferences are stored
.upr2: in this file type application specific HKCU registry settings are being store
.upf2:  in this file type application specific files are being stored (i.e. placing a favorite shortcut in your Internet Explorer)

Application based user settings are loaded in the background after a session has started, so no logon delay will occur, only application start may possibly result in a delay when background loading of the user settings is still busy when starting the application.

The {GUID} before the extension equals the GUID of the managed application in your RES PowerFuse environment:

In RES PowerFuse 2010 you have the ability to use User Settings in several ways:
• Track any setting changed by application immediately
• Track specified settings on application/session start/end

These are two totally different settings, and you need to fully understand the difference on how to use them:

Track any settings is a useful setting to use when you simply don’t know where settings of a particular application are stored. When you enable this setting RES PowerFuse is triggered to capture all changes in the HKCU key and all changes to files and folders in %APPDATA% and %LOCALAPPDATA%, invoked by the application. These settings are stored in your userpref folder and will be restored, the next time you start an application. This Mode is for example very useful for applications which store their settings in HKCU\Software\APPName key.

Track specified settings is a useful setting when you know in which HKCU key the application is storing its settings. This enables you to only save specific keys with your user settings, which results in smaller files, quicker application startup time and clear understanding of how an application stores its settings.

The big dilemma here is why shouldn’t you just use track any settings at all your applications, this seems easy, and you don’t need to bother which keys to preserve? Well there is no simple answer to that question, as in many IT dilemmas: it depends….

For example when you want to preserve settings from Microsoft Word, probably you don’t want all settings to be stored, since Microsoft Word does a lot of settings in the HKCU key even without specifically changing a setting. So a best practice for an application such as Microsoft Word is to find out which settings are stored in which keys. In RES PowerFuse 2010 you can do this by running the application in sampling mode for clarifying which keys to preserve.

When you run your application into sampling mode, all setting which are preserved are stored on your sampling mode tab. Simply choose here which settings you want to preserve for this application and put them into the targeted items section when switching your application into Track specified settings Mode.

Put these keys in targeted items:

All these settings are loaded onto your profile when starting a session, after the logon process is done!

When you want specific settings not to be preserved by the users (i.e. blue background, white text), just put in an exclusion on the targeted item.