The Citrix User Profile Manager, included with XenDesktop 3, is similar in nature to the Flex Profile Kit. Citrix is providing User Profile Manager as the tool to easily, and reliably, manage user personalization settings in XenApp and XenDesktop deployments.

By default, UPM will save the entire HKCU registry hive, though it can be configured to save specific keys, and specified files and folders stored within the users profile at logoff to the user store. At logon, the data is copied from the user store and imported into the current user profile.

UPM would need to be installed to all XenApp servers, and if using Provisioning Server, to your base OS image. By default, the installation directory is C:\Program Files\Citrix\User Profile Manager. Like the Flex Profile Kit, UPM provides an INI files (stored in the installation directory) for custom configurations, but it also provides a GPO ADM template which can be imported into the Group Policy Administration console. Personally, I like configuring UPM through group policy, especially in a XenDesktop/Provisioning Server deployment simply because it may keep you from the process of:

a. determining the INI needs to be changed
b. converting the vDisk from Shared to Private
c. booting the private image and making the INI change
d. converting the vDisk back to Shared
e. rebooting desktops to test the INI change
f. repeat if necessary

The installation of UPM is straightforward and is completed in only a few clicks. It does require a reboot of the system however.

Once imported, UPM policies are added to the Computer Configuration Settings as shown below:

Perhaps the most important policy to set is Path to user store. This represents the directory in which all user personalization settings will be saved. For the UPM policies, #cn# is used instead of %username%.

I may be moving beyond a simple introduction so I’m going to stop this post here. I’m sure there will be more to follow, but I encourage you to give UPM a try in your environment.

To download UPM, you’ll need a mycitrix login.