Device Management versus User Environment Management

As Gartner states, 83% of organizations are investing in ‘Windows Modern Management’ and another 12% are planning to do so the coming year. Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) is a crucial part in this, as it enables the management of devices through a single console. However, most of the UEM tooling lacks the capability of User Environment Management (eg profile management and policy management) and requires specialist knowledge to perform standard, let alone non-standard, modern workspace management.

To address these challenges in UEM practice, Liquidware has developed its platform-independent User Environment Management web console  ProfileUnity . Using a user-centric approach, ProfileUnity enables IT management with a fast, simple, scalable, and multi-tenant solution to perform contextual user environment management.

Contextual, efficient and flexible management

A few key components of User Environment Management are:

• Decoupling profiles:  by detaching user profiles from Windows, the profile becomes universally portable and compatible with any supported Windows operating system. This has several advantages. For example: when devices are shared (common practice in healthcare), during migrations, or for disaster recovery.
• Better user experience:  the settings of a user are no longer attached to a device, but to a user profile. This significantly improves user experience and efficiency, without compromising the workspace.
• Advanced and efficient IT administration:  a lot of specialized in-depth (scripting) knowledge is needed to create contextual settings for users. With User Environment Management as an addition to standard EUM tooling (such as Intune or VMware workspace one), contextual management becomes much easier and more sophisticated.
• Efficiency:  because no scripting is required, much time (and even resources) can be saved by IT admins, as adding contextual user information no longer takes three hours but only three minutes. This again has a positive effect on the user experience, as you can process changes almost real-time instead of being dependent on sync policies.
• Security:  having the ability to intervene with the users’ workspace allows for quickly mitigating security risks by removing access to unwanted programs or force new security policies to apply. 

For whom?

Especially organizations that manage complex environments which require contextual settings (such as large governmental organizations) and organizations that work in shifts (and therefore share their Windows devices) could benefit from the profile and policy management features the solution offers. Nevertheless, for all organizations looking for advanced, efficient, and qualitative modern management: User Environment Management is the way forward.