Following on from the Application Upgrades in RES Workspace Manager post, I thought I would put pen to paper to put to bed the confusion surrounding the whole “Migration settings” for RES Workspace Manager 2011 User Preferences/Settings. In fact, RES Workspace Manager allows for two separate types of User Settings migration; the migration of user settings stored in a previous location and migration of User Settings when switching between Zero-Profiling modes (from RES Workspace Manager 2011 SR2 onwards). There is often the miscomprehension that the migration options will automagically migrate user settings between defined applications, i.e. Word 2003 to Word 2007. This is categorically not the case (and will be a future post!). So what are the differences between the two options?
User Settings Storage Migration
This option available under the Composition > User Settings within the RES Workspace Manager console allows you to migrate stored User Settings from a previous location and looks just a little bit like this:
When would we enable this option? You will use this option when you want to move or copy settings stored in a prior location to an alternative location. Historically, RES PowerFuse always required that you stored the user’s User Settings in their home drive location. Although hidden, this could quite often cause confusion and had serious consequences if hard quotas were in place.
Starting with RES Workspace Manager 2011, this is no longer the case. User Settings still have to reside within an assigned drive letter location, but this no longer has to be the same location as the user’s home directory. This very option enables you to migrate existing user settings from a previous location to another drive. Nothing more, nothing less (and no migration of settings defined behind a Word 2003 application to Word 2007!). Here’s an example:
- User home directories are mapped to H: and you previously stored the User Settings in the \PWRMENU subfolder (may or may not be mapped via Active Directory).
- You wish to store User Settings in the X:\UserSettings folder that will be hidden by RES Workspace Manager (how and where you map X: are up to you!).
- Configuring the migration settings as above will move all the User Settings from H:\PWRMENU to X:\UserSettings, but only if they exist.
- All new captured User Settings will be put into X:\UserSettings.
Zero-Profile Migration
The second User Settings migration option allows you to migrate existing User Settings captured with one Zero-Profile mode to the other, i.e. migrate UPR/UPF files to/from UPR2/UPF2 files. You may or may not know this, but the way in which RES Workspace Manager stores User Settings depends on the configured Zero-Profile mode. If an application is configured to “Capture” then the settings are stored in the traditional format, e.g. .UPR and .UPF files. If you happen to configure an application in “Tracking” mode then you’ll end up with .UPR2 and .UPF2 files. I am informed that this is due to the fact that tracked settings are appended to the resulting file (and compressed) as they’re changed etc.
By default, if you switch from one Zero-Profile mode to another, RES Workspace Manager will suddenly be looking for User Settings files that don’t exist. Worse still, if you happened to have had the other mode configured for a while, changed it and then reverted, you may place some old Users Settings back into the user’s profile!
The migration setting on the User Settings tab behind an application is designed to help avoid this situation and migrate the captured User Settings to/from UPR/UPR2 (and UPF/UPF2) files.
The settings above have the following definitions:
- Ignore – RES Workspace Manager will ignore the other file type (if present) and start capturing in the configured mode.
- Remove – RES Workspace Manager will delete the User Settings stored (if present) in the alternative format.
- Apply and Remove – RES Workspace Manager will migrate the stored User Settings (if present) and then delete the alternative format.
All this is fairly straight forward once you know the in’s and out’s (and still no migration of settings defined behind a Word 2003 application to Word 2007 regardless of the configured Zero-Profile mode!). You can manually move User Settings from one application to another and this might be a future post or even make it into the Virtual Engine Toolkit.
As always, I hope this helps clarify things for somebody, some day! Iain
