RES WM 2012 SR3 Discover User Settings

Recently RES Software released service release 3, for Workspace Manager 2012. It came with al lot of improvements.
One of the new things in this release that I really like is a thing called ‘Discover User Settings’. This feature gives you the possibility to find out where a application is going to store it’s settings. Previously you had to use other tools to find this information, now it is all stored in your RES WM console. In this blog I will explain how you can use this new feature.

When you add a new application in RES WM you see a whole set of tabs in which you can configure how of for which users this application is available. The tab I want to talk about today is the tab called ‘User Settings’.

When you open this tab, and click on ‘Add’ you’ll see this little context menu.  Within this context menu you click on ‘Discover User Settings’.

Workspace Manager now guides you thru a wizard to discover the user settings.

First you need to confirm the executable and the working directory. You are given the opportunity to enter some parameters before the application in launched.
Now the application is launched, this gives RES the opportunity to discover where the user settings for this application are stored.

When the application is closed you’ll see the above message.
When the discover process over you are presented with a list of file locations or registry keys where the given application is storing or reading user settings. Let me show you some examples of various applications.

MS Paint

MS Project ThinApp package

Adobe Reader

As you can see there is al checkbox for each line, this gives you the possibility to exclude a line. In the above screenshot you should exclude de line that says ‘HKCU’. When you click ‘Finish’ in the above screen you can tell RES WM to monitor these locations to capture the user settings.