Providing User Personas in View

With the View Persona Management feature, a user's remote profile is dynamically downloaded when the user logs in to a View desktop. You can configure View to store user profiles in a secure, centralized repository. View downloads persona information as the user needs it.

View Persona Management is an alternative to Windows roaming profiles. View Persona Management expands functionality and improves performance compared to Windows roaming profiles.

You can configure and manage personas entirely within View. You do not have to configure Windows roaming profiles. If you have a Windows roaming profiles configuration, you can use your existing repository configuration with View.

A user profile is independent of the virtual desktop. When a user logs in to any desktop, the same profile appears.

For example, a user might log in to a floating-assignment, linked-clone desktop pool and change the desktop background and Microsoft Word settings. When the user starts the next session, the virtual machine is different, but the user sees the same settings.

A user profile comprises a variety of user-generated information:

■	User-specific data and desktop settings
■	Application data and settings
■	Windows registry entries configured by user applications

Also, if you provision desktops with ThinApp applications, the ThinApp sandbox data can be stored in the user profile and roamed with the user.

View Persona Management minimizes the time it takes to log in to and log off of desktops. Login and logoff time can be a problem with Windows roaming profiles.

■	During login, View downloads only the files that Windows requires, such as user registry files. Other files are copied to the local desktop when the user or an application opens them from the local profile folder.
■	View copies recent changes in the local profile to the remote repository, typically once every few minutes. The default is every 10 minutes. You can specify how often to upload the local profile.
■	During logoff, only files that were updated since the last replication are copied to the remote repository.