How to Distribute applications using Symantec's Endpoint Virtualization

Hello and welcome to another screen cast review on WebInformant.tv. I'm David Strom your host and reviewer. Today, we look at Symantec's Endpoint Virtualization Suite. It composed of a series of different products that allow you to manage multiple ways to deliver your applications across your enterprise, and as a complex but very powerful product, so the let's get started showing you a few scenarios. One of the bigger benefits of using Virtualized applications is where you want to have the ability to run applications that don't play nicely together. Virtualization puts each application in its own protective layer. They don't step on anything else in your system. For our example, we show you would desktop that’s running both the old Word 97 and Word 2003 versions of Microsoft Office. Normally you can install them both on the same system but you can’t do it with Symantec’s technology. You also the ability to track all of your software licenses in real time and get a solid picture of who is using what piece of software when, so you can reduce your licensing expenses. You can also automatically remove unused applications from the user's desktop after a certain period of time too. One other aspect of virtualization technology that is new to this version is the ability to get a lot more granular with how you set your application layers. We're looking at the virtualization consul here, and if we right click on one of the applications we can see the details about how to separate each layer or set up dependencies or hide them from the OS itself. Let's move onto the second issue the ability to support users who are only occasionally connected to your corporate network, but still need to get their applications from the central server. One of the weaknesses of other streaming products is that you need a continuous network in the internet connection to run your ups. Symantec is added support for offline users and there are several ways to accomplish this with the Symantec’s suit. One way is to use streaming and the new version can figure out whether the user is on a laptop or a desktop and deliver the application accordingly. He has set up a web based portal so that users can bring up their browsers to start their applications. You notice that when you expand all them we can see by the various icons whether they're offline enabled or can sense if a laptop as being used. Another way is to set up connection broker that will deliver protected desktop with the select number of applications that can be launched which is similar to what Citrix and Microsoft terminal server do. You have the ability to grab user’s profiles from Microsoft active directory then map for particular applications they will run and with other resources they will have access too. You can also set up particular parameters for each Windows OS version here by going into Applications Menu and you see the screen. If we go back to Menu and drill into the users we can also go into the workspace tab and can set up particulars for the applications that will appear on each user's desktop. We can customize the appearance of the desktop and match their role to what will be shown. Once we get all these information together, we can show you how it looks from the user perspective. Here we're looking at the log in the screen of the work space part of the suit and once we log in you'll see we automatically launch solitaire. Although you probably want to set up something, a bit more work related. Users can resume the state of their sessions without having to reload applications which is great for certain environments. We can also go to a browser from outside the corporate network and gain access to the same desktop as well. What are things I liked about the product numero uno is its flexibility. You can support a very wide arrangement of used cases including Virtualized the applications that need to be protected from each other, stream applications so you can manage centrally and still deliver them locally. Create protected remote desktops too. You can also divert the very complex layers that are dependent on other layers, and you can go in and patch an existing layer and end or upgrade the application inside it. You can support a mixture of virtual machines, terminal sessions and streamlined applications from this Symantec suit. What are the things I didn't like? There isn't a single consul for all the various components and the installation is very complex, and we’ll take some experimentation and lots of fine tuning. There is this single policy repository either for all used cases of although Symantec is working on both of these for future versions. Thanks for watching Webinformant.tv where you can find other screen cast reviews of Symantec products. This is David Strom feel free to send me email David@Strom.com.