In April this year, Microsoft announced a new solution called User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) in a first Beta. In June Microsoft released a second beta and now Microsoft has announced the Release Candidate of UE-V, meaning that its now feature complete.
UE-V is a so called user environment management (UEM) product capable of applying settings when applications are opened, and save those settings when the applications is saved, in contradiction with already existing solutions like roaming profiles and folder redirection which only work at logon and logoff of a user. Besides application settings UE-V is also capable of roaming system settings across devices.
The Release Candidate has the following changes, detailed here:
- Ability to control UE-V on a per-user basis using Security Groups and a new Group Policy.
- Performance improvements by allowing for settings packages to be processed concurrently
- Ability to control synchronization using Windows PowerShell
- Support for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 RTM
UE-V will be part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2012 which is expected to be released in the last quarter of this year. This also means that we can expect App-V 5.0 in that timeframe as well.
What’s also interesting about this slide presented is that MED-V is still listed as a solution, while Microsoft hasn’t shared any detail yet about its plans for this product – the product in its basis provides a way to provide Managed VM’s to a client hypervisor.