I was a long-time customer of ScriptLogic’s Desktop Authority for the better part of 5 years before switching sides and becoming an implementation engineer.  After leaving my old environment at my last job and walking into so many customer sites that didn’t have it, it became easily one of my most missed products I used on a regular basis and the need for so many customers to have it became extremely clear. Time and time again I’ve seen customers writing batch files to map drives or run processes, struggling with configuring printers on hundreds of desktops, and fighting with end users to keep desktops clean and secure to prevent even more problems down the road.

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Last month I had the excellent opportunity to work at a customer who was in dire need of a solution that would help them combat roaming profiles, make users desktops uniform, allow them to clean up group policy, and ease the overall burden of desktop management. I knew just the thing! Desktop Authority was absolutely the way to go. I was able to duplicate every policy they had in group policy through Desktop Authority and then remove it from group policy all together. Why would you do this you may ask… Desktop Authority is built in a way that complex policies in group policy become a little simpler. The logic behind the policies are a little more plain English and certainly easier to find than having to drill down through dozens of menus just to find the disable button for the firewall for example. Desktop Authority is able to keep it clean concise and maybe even more important, understandable!

Next up was locking down the desktops. There were users with roaming profiles around the 2GB mark and you can bet that in any environment it’s going to take a long time to log in! We completely did away with roaming profiles by locking down the user’s desktops. No more saving items to the desktop, period! The customer wanted everyone’s desktop to look the same which made finding things and troubleshooting much easier for the support team. We put policies in place that would redirect their “My Documents” folder to an “H” drive which was their personal drive that they could save anything to. This way it doesn’t slow log in times and the user always knows where their files are. More importantly the files were protected… Before when users were saving everything to their “C” Drive or their desktop, more often than not when their hard drive crashed or their profile had to be deleted they always lost data! Not anymore! The data is saved on the customers SAN now through the use of that mapped drive.  We also removed the ability to set your own wallpaper and screensaver. I know, I know we are mean but we had to keep it clean. Now everyone has the same wallpaper and the “black screen” screensaver. After 15 minutes of inactivity the screensaver comes on, after 30 minutes the desktops lock preventing others from going to an unattended machine and access data.

Also in the vein of desktop optimization we were able to push every shortcut or program that each user needed. In our case we did it by Organizational Unit. Everyone in department “X” got the same shortcuts on every machine they logged into while users from department “Y” could go behind them and log into the same machine and get all the icons that they needed even though they were totally different. Another issue that was faced was mail profiles. Because users were travelling from machine to machine frequently, each time they went to a machine they had to get their mail profile setup again by calling the Help Desk. Not anymore! Desktop Authority can do that for you. Now whenever the user logs in the mail profile for that user is automatically generated, this makes things better for the user and the Help Desk.

There were many other policies we put in place to make things easier… Little things here and there, that go a long way… We mapped all essential drives they may need, set up the machines to reboot each night, configured BGInfo to load on each machine at startup, disable the IE tour, etc. This thing can do it all. Desktop Authority can replace the functionality of WSUS and patch many other non Microsoft Products as well! On my next visit we will be redoing their printing.  Currently they have no great way to setup printers. In fact they have been going to each computer and manually setting up the printers through TCP/IP ports, not anymore though. We will be able to simply pop everything into Desktop Authority and can map all the printers by user, computer, OU, you name it. It’s definitely going to take a load off but that’s a different blog all together.

I said everything above to say this. Desktop Authority is an excellent product and is absolutely worth your time to check it out. You can get a 30 day demo and try it yourself! I promise it will make your life easier in some way. 

Click <a href="http://www.scriptlogic.com/products/desktopauthority/" target="_blank">Here</a> to check out the Desktop Authority website for the demo.