Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced released
A few days ago Immidio released their new version of Flex Profiles. Flex Profiles can be used together with mandatory profiles to store pre-defined settings (eg: wallpaper, ie passwords, outlook signature ect) but keep the advantages of a full mandatory profile (speed, corruption, bloating) we like to call this a “hybrid profile”.
Lucky as i am i had a chance to test Flex Profiles Advanced and some of the new features that are in it. Below you will find a list of what i think are the most cool new features!
- Pricing -Flex Profiles Advanced fixes a very specific problem for a small price
- Cross platform desktop support
- Support for virtualized applications! (app-v, thinapp etc)
- Compression of the zipfiles that hold the user settings/files (This can save a lot of disk space but watch the performance!)
- Fully configurable via GPO, woohoo no more ini files on every machine
GUI & Automated INI file creation
One of the more time-consuming actions with Flex has always been the creating of the application INI files, the INI files are used to tell the FlexEngine what files / settings have to be saved. But instead of doing this completely by hand you can now use The Flex Profiles Assistant:
- Start the Flex Profiles Assistant
- Start Procmon monitoring (can be done from within de assistant)
- Change some settings that you want the FlexEngine to save
- Stop Procmon monitoring
- Save the Logfile in XML format
- Let the assistant process the logfile and zip it. (Hint: This has to be done on a reference machine, the assistant adds machine info like redirected folders etc to the log file)
- Import the .FLEX file in the Flex Profiles Management Console
- Select the application you want to Flex
- Very important! Check if what the Assistant put in the INI file makes sense! And clean up anything you do not want to be saved / you thing is not important to save.
An other great new feature are the predefined common settings, this is a list of actions you want the FlexEngine to perform without configuring an INI file. For instance you can now click “Internet Explorer – auto complete settings” and the engine is configured to save all settings necessary to remember IE passwords. You can imagine how much easier this is than figuring out an INI file.
As a conclusion: After testing this version of Immidio Flex Profiles i must say i am impressed by the processing speed of the engine and the enormous list of new features they implemented to make our lives easier: This product is worth the money guys!
Example INI FIle:
[IncludeRegistryTrees]
HKCU\Software\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\9.0[Information]
Title = Acrobat Reader 9
Description = To be able to read PDF Files[Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced Edition]
This file was created using the Immidio Flex Profiles Management Console.
Only use with Immidio Flex Profiles Advanced Edition.