We just recently setup the BES Consoles to be run from citrix instances where users can login to avoid wan delays in remote offices. The setup works quite nicely, however, it keeps separate console caches on each of the citrix instances, so any settings/looks/views that a user sets for themself are different on the different instances, which is somewhat annoying. We did some research on the possibility of setting up roaming profiles over terminal service on AD side but that would require a lot of storage space to be dedicated to users as all local cache will be stored there, as well as introduce additional latency during the login process due to the replication to external storage location.
Is there any way around this problem? Is there any way to sync up the user’s preferences/views/looks by themselves without having to sync up the entire BigFix cache? Is there a universal place (file, registry, etc) where those preferences are stored on the local machine?
We deploy the BES Console via Citrix as well. All of our BES Users have a Terminal Server Home Directory defined for their AD Accounts and it gets mapped to a specific drive letter during logon. I use this to our advantage. How? I created a script to launch the BES Console and the first part of the script imports a Registry Key that contains the user’s BES Console settings. The first time a user logs into the published application, the reg file does not exist, so it is not imported. Each time the user logs out, a script runs (via local policy) to export the BES Console settings from the BES registry key to a file in their Terminal Services Home Directory. The second time the user logs in, the reg key gets imported and presto, the settings are there.
curth, I did something very similar as well but instead of a local policy I set it as login/logoff scripts with the citrix instances. When user logs in it check if they have previously exported own preferences and if they do it imports it, if not it imports a default profile that we defined for the first-time users to see. During the logoff it exports the user settings, so it preserves and changes the user has made. Also, within the login/logoff script I built in the setting of all custom right-click options which are in a very close proximity (HKCU\Software\BigFix\Enterprise Console\Settings), so that at any given point all users see those custom right-click menu options. It works pretty neat.
curth, I meant the right-click menu -> http://support.bigfix.com/labs/customright.html but we built our own version of it with a number of custom options and I import it for every user during the login script.