sepagoPROFILE - Development of a more efficient profile management solution

Challenge

In the terminal server field it had frequently been observed that not all settings performed in user profiles were saved, especially in so-called silo environments. In practice, this regularly led to problems for the users and to queries to technical support, who were unable to offer a lasting solution, however. Due to the system, it was unavoidable that each open application created a local copy of the central roaming profile on the application server, which was written back to the central storage location in its entirety when the session was terminated. This led to the loss of settings from sessions that were created between the start and the termination of the current session. After an analysis of the cause (which has become known as the "last writer wins" problem) and the determination that there was no satisfactory and technically clean remedy available, sepago embarked on the development of its own solution

Tasks

• Development of a solution for the consistent administration of the user profiles

Solution

sepago's idea was to use an intelligent synchronization mechanism to prevent having to store back the entire local copy of a profile into the centrally-stored profile. Instead, only those profile changes that had actually been performed were to be written back. In this process, a timestamp comparison was to ensure that the respective last setting persisted in the case of competing changes in parallel sessions. To provide such a solution for all environments, sepago's experts analyzed via "reverse engineering" how corresponding code could be optimally integrated into the login process on the various Windows systems from XP to Server 2008. The solution that emerged was the product that became known as sepagoPROFILE and that clearly distinguished itself through simple installation and perfect system integration from other approaches: The sepago solution reduced the number of write processes. Not only did this reduce network load, but also the probability of occurrence of profile corruption, which results in inconsistent user profiles that applications cannot open. Convinced by these benefits, Citrix decided to integrate sepagoPROFILE into its products and acquired the software in 2007 from sepago.

Added value of the sepago solution

• Increased user satisfaction
• Reduction of support load
• Reduction of network load
• Reduction of system cost