Property Management Firm Optimises Desktop Performance and User Experience with Liquidware Labs

Nov. 6, 2012 - PRLog -- CHICAGO, IL and London, UK – October 31, 2012 – Liquidware Labs, the leader in desktop transformation solutions, has announced that homes and communities organisation, livin, based in the UK, has deployed the Liquidware Labs user-virtualisation solution, ProfileUnity . The software helps livin maintain and improve end-user experiences as the company migrates to a virtual desktop infrastructure.

livin provides affordable housing and manages in excess of 8,500 residential and commercial properties in North East England. When moving operations to new offices, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) team wanted to deploy a virtual desktop environment using the VMware View platform.  The team saw tremendous benefits in migrating to a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) but was also aware of the new management challenges.

“The biggest reason virtual desktop initiatives fail is the user experience,” said Dan Evans, livin ICT Infrastructure Manager. “And the biggest issue is profile management. We have a diverse software environment, so we have to use more than just a few standard images. With the remote presentation sessions we used previously, we thus had problems with profile synchronisation and overall virtual desktops stability. We could not go forward with VDI until we had a solid way to manage our user profiles.”

To take on this challenge, livin turned to ProfileUnity from Liquidware Labs. ProfileUnity works with VMware View and other platforms that support Windows, including Citrix XenDesktop. ProfileUnity also delivers a complete profile to users at log-on in seconds—including desktop customisations, applications and data. The solution also provides administrators with summary and complete views of virtual desktop settings as well as many reporting options.

With the help of ProfileUnity, livin will bring all 175 of its users into the new virtual desktop infrastructure. The organisation also frequently updates and optimises its physical PCs and has found the process is much easier with ProfileUnity.


“We selected ProfileUnity because it’s much easier to install and configure compared to the other solutions, and it fits seamlessly into the VMware environment,” said Evans. “Once installed, ProfileUnity is a simple and elegant solution. It’s also easy-to-use with exactly what we need:  The ability to provide consistent user experiences with desktop and application stacks that are highly individualised; and the ability to preserve user desktop settings without having to revert to the default at each log-in.”