On the run up to VMworld 2009, there seems to be an increasing amount of activity on the subject of user personalization in VDI. Gartner has written about dynamic workspace includng user personalization as a key element of the stack. What does it mean? What is user personalization all about? And, where does it need to be? Let's take a closer look.

Aren't all PCs supposed to be personalized? What's the big deal?

Personalization of the desktop is really all about making the working experience for the user as effective as possible. Sure this means users have photos of their family or favorite sports team as their wallpaper, but personalization is more than that! Think about all the things you have done to make your personal computer your own - from toolbar settings to your email signature, to applications you have installed since being supplied with your machine. Then think about how IT is able to manage the user-specific component of this machine - corporate policy, user access rights, PC lifecycle management, patching and security updates. It's a constant struggle between IT who needs to manage the PC and the user to wants to personalize it. The more personal the PC, the less control IT has over that machine and the more expensive it becomes to manage.

Does desktop virtualization help or hurt the cause for users?

The emergence of desktop virtualization provides a real opportunity to address this long-standing struggle. Those assets of the desktop that are common to many users, including corporate OS and apps, can now be standardized and automatically delivered 'on-demand' to users from a central source. In fact, the only way to get scalable and cost effective virtual desktops is with single instance management of the corporate OS and applications - as with Citrix XenDesktop. A 'corporate' OS can be dynamically provisioned into a virtual image, and likewise, corporate applications can be delivered on-demand onto the virtual desktop as needed. The result? A scalable, low-management, low-storage, low-cost corporate desktop for all employees. The third key component of this scalable virtual desktop is personalization - so that you can make each user's virtual desktop personal.

So, how do you pick the right solution?

Based on my interactions with customers successfully implementing virtual desktops, I have come to a conclusion that there are 5 key requirements that you need to consider for delivering personalized virtual desktops:

1. Starting with managed user profiles or equivalent - A system that can store user settings and personalization changes. A system that can provide an easy and fast way to manage the settings for users. This is included as part of XenDesktop and gets you started with your personalized virtual desktops.
2. Getting On-demand 'personality' - To increase the responsiveness of the desktop and logon, only provide parts of the user personality required by the user at the time when needed. Why load what a user is not going to use?
3. Allowing user-centric configuration - This may be a bit counter-intuitive to personalization; however, role based configuration is a critical component of making every user's desktop 'personal'. It starts with configuring which applications a user has access to. XenDesktop (with XenApp as an application management system) offers the ability to control the applications. IT may need more granular control - such as what printers users will need and what drives they can access.
4. System self-healing from user errors - To be able to automatically roll back to pre-configured user settings in case any personalized changes made by zero conflict centralized configurations.
5. Ensuring visibility - Giving IT the ability to see into the user environment and solve potential problems before the user gets involved creates a continuously improving desktop estate as well as reducing costs

How do you get it going?

We have included #1 and parts of #3 in Citrix XenDesktop. To address other requirements that cover comprehensive enterprise-level control and management of personalization, I have seen customers successfully use the combined solution of Citrix XenDesktop and AppSense Environment Management to good effect. In addition, AppSense Environment Management is also able to offer Enterprise-level scale to cover not just your virtual desktops but also your physical environments, or environments where you may be using multiple technologies such as XenApp published/hosted or streamed apps to physical PCs and XenDesktop.

So when you hear about 'user personalization' or 'user profiles', look deeper into the details of what's being discussed. Successful (low-cost, high adoption) VDI requires the ability to use a single instance of OS and apps on demand across an entire company. I have seen that customers have successfully combined Citrix XenDesktop with AppSense Environment Management to ensure user adoption across all platforms for thousands of users, and it's being considered as the most complete solution for delivering personalized virtual desktops.

What to expect in coming weeks?

I expect to see more point solutions and some technology acquisitions and OEMs. However, they have two fundamental shortcomings, in my opinion:

• They are built only with the perspective of user personalization. Any user personalization product needs a solid desktop virtualization solution.

• They solve one of the requirements I listed above and may not be enough to address all of enterprise requirements.

As you are doing your assessment on personalization, I encourage you to review this list of requirements that I have seen in successful implmentations of virtual desktops. Also, I'd love to hear your comments on other requirements around personalization that I haven't covered here.

I've been looking at the breakdown of a desktop in a series of blogs.   In the first blog, I talked about how every desktop starts with a base operating system.  The second blog talked about application delivery and integration into the OS. The third layer of a desktop is personalization.  Many people think that personalization is simply a user's profile.  Well, personalization goes well beyond that. 

Think, for a moment, about what you do to your laptop or desktop to personalize it for yourself. Ignore the whole concept of virtual desktops at this point.   I've done the following to my own Citrix laptop:

Settings: I've changed the default settings for, well, just about everything, operating system and applications.

• Desktop background is Homer Simpson.
• My computer icon is Homer and the Recycle Bin is Lisa (because Lisa is the environmental Simpson). 
• I've configured my delivered applications with Citrix Visio stencils, Outlook with my personal signature, Office custom dictionary with terms like  XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer, NetScaler and WANScaler. 
• I've added numerous favorites into my browser

Local Applications: Even though I receive most of my applications from Citrix IT, I've also installed a few applications on my own.  

• Video recording software: I continue to post video blogs and record configuration videos for Citrix solutions. I need a video recording solution not delivered by the IT department.
• Video Player: I've had to install numerous codecs/video players for different Citrix Videos I've created
• Instant Messenger: I've installed different IM programs so I can talk to coworkers
• Browser: Not everyone uses Internet Explorer.  With Firefox, Chrome, and others different people want to use different browsers. 

Information (Data): The data category is very important for personalization. You want to make sure your data is available where you would normally place it.  When you do a Save in Microsoft Word, the application defaults to Documents. 

Attachments:  What attachments do you use on your desktop? I've connected different digital cameras, webcams, MP3 players, mobile phone and printers.  Although many might not be Corporate Approved, they have been needed from time-to-time. 

By modifying application and system settings, adding your own local applications, attaching different peripherals and creating, storing and access data, you have turned an otherwise standard desktop into your very own, personal desktop.   That was the easy part.  The hard part is how do we virtualize the personalization layer so it can be applied during logon and change an otherwise standard corporate desktop, to one that is completely inline with what the user requires?  I could spend an entire blog on each of these four items, which I might do in the future, but for now I'll summarize.

A major part of the personalization strategy is focused on Profiles.  Most people cringe when they hear profiles because of issues they've encountered with Terminal Services and XenApp.  However, think about why we had profile issues in a XenApp world? Users would log on to many XenApp servers at a time, resulting in their roaming profile being pushed to numerous servers. Then when you logged out, that profile was uploaded, resulting in 1 profile overwriting another profile.  With XenDesktop, how many virtual desktops will most people use at a time? One.  Because of this design consideration, many of the challenges for profiles would be non-existent. 

However, we still must setup profile correctly.  We need to make sure the profile are optimized so they load faster (which is possible with the help of the Citrix User Profile Manager).  Also, we need to make sure the profiles are configured in such a way that the special folders (Desktop, Favorites, etc) are redirected off of the virtual desktop and onto persistent storage (File server). I'm briefly talking about profiles because in order to do it correctly, you need to have a solid profile strategy, something too long to discuss in this blog posting.  Right now, we can't do everything we need in profiles.

For Attachments we have to rely on virtual channels between the user's endpoint and the virtual desktop.  Whenever a USB device is plugged into the endpoint, it should appear on the virtual desktop.  With XenDesktop, this is a work in progress. Some things work and some do not.  But now is a good time to generate your list of what devices are required so you are ready to test with subsequent versions of XenDesktop.

The final item, applications, is an interesting topic.  Applications  are a layer in the desktop but it is also part of personalization because users add their own apps to personalize the desktop.  Before we go to potential solutions, we need to determine if this is needed.  Do you want users to be installing untested, untrusted, nonstandard applications into your protected data center? Or should you require the users to install these types of applications on their own end point device, outside of the data center? This is the first decision. As part of the virtual desktop analysis, you will hopefully identify the non-IT applications. If certain applications are used by a number of employees, maybe IT needs to add these into the application layer and start delivering them as a corporate resource.  If not, users will install the applications on their own. If using pooled desktops in XenDesktop, those changes will be destroyed upon logout. This will cause frustration and disapproval of the solution.  You can either

1. Grant certain users assigned virtual desktops instead of pooled.  With assigned virtual desktops, the desktop is never destroyed and only belongs to a single user, but this brings about a whole slew of issues around maintenance and management
2. Train users to install the applications on their local end point device
3. Use a some other solution that is not released yet that virtualizes any installed application and delivers to the user on future virtual desktops. I haven't seen anything like this yet.  Who knows what the future will hold.

Hopefully, this blog has shed some light onto the complexities of personalization.  I wish I could say Citrix has all of the solutions in XenDesktop right now, but I doubt many of you would believe me.  I can tell you that Citrix is working on this as this is the personalization discussion is a major piece of the virtual desktop puzzle. BTW, if you want to remember the the four areas of Virtual Desktop Personalization, just remember the LISA Areas for Personalization: Local applications, Information (data), Settings, and Attachments.  This goes hand-in-hand with the BART Principles of application integration for virtual desktops.

Daniel

Part I of the Deep Dive into XenDesktop series reviewed the architecture. Part II covered the install and management tools. Part III reviewed an example XenDesktop Pilot Architecture. Part IV reviewed the Virtual Desktop Delivery of Dan Feller's "XenDesktop Pilot Implementation Guide". Part V reviewed the integration with XenApp for application delivery to the virtual desktops. Part VI covers User Personalization with Citrix User Profile Manager. This is the third section from Dan's Pilot Implementation Guide.

This embedded presentation covers the "Personalization" section of the Pilot Implementation Guide.

Click here to view the presentation in full screen at Slide Share.

This presentation does have several slide notes that provide additional detail. You can view the slide notes here.



Frank Anderson on the XenDesktop team has created a few screencasts covering the features of XenDesktop. You can watch his short screencast covering the provisioning and lifecycle management features of XenDesktop here. Frank's screencast on user experience is available here.

Download the free XenDesktop Express Edition here