I still get quite a lot of requests from people regarding how to add applications into Personalization Server. A few of these requests revolve around best practices, but the lion's share are about actually how to get the applications in there with the minimum effort required, mainly from people with limited time and resources who are also concerned about the effects on their user sessions and application performance if they haven't configured Personalization correctly. We will use this post to do a quick run-through of how to add a simple application into Personalization for those who need a step-by-step guide, and use the Config Assistant and Template Creator to (hopefully) keep the data being saved as lean and mean as possible.
Remember that this "application personalization testing" process should generally be done for all applications prior to go-live or, if you've new applications coming on-board, in a test environment that runs alongside your live systems. As we are going to use the Config Assistant rather than just letting Personalization Server discover all the user data itself, and additionally, we're going to remove the global includes and excludes, we can expect this approach to a) increase the database load, and b) possibly affect the Personalization of live systems that are relying on the global includes and excludes. I know most of my readers are quite savvy, but I never know when a lawsuit could be coming my way, so the disclaimer is here nice and early :-)
Obviously you first need to have the EM agents deployed to your endpoints and Personalization turned on in your deployed configuration. You'd be amazed how many times people (including myself) forget to actually turn Personalization on in the config.
We also need to be at version 8.3 or higher if we are going to use the Config Assistant Template Creator. If your infrastructure is 8.2 or lower, you can only use the Config Assistant and you will have to cut and paste the necessary Registry keys and folders straight from the Config Assistant into the Personalization console.
Next thing to make sure you've got configured is a Personalization Group that your test users are actually a member of. Obviously, if no Personalization Groups are configured, then users will be caught by the Default Users group, but it is not intended to be used for actually deploying Personalization applications.
Note - when configuring the Membership Rules for your Personalization Group, try to avoid the use of Computer Group and Computer Name rules. It also pays to try and keep them as simple as possible - lots of ORs and ANDs doesn't help the processing time.
Now, we need to turn on Data Collection in the Properties tab of our Personalization Group. As we are going to use the Config Assistant (discussed in this previous post) to help us personalize the application, this is a necessary step. I'm not clear on whether Data Collection also requires the "Automatically Discover User Applications" function to be turned on, but as I've seen some spurious output when it's not activated, I generally also make sure it is on at this stage.
You will get a warning at this stage about the increased overhead of Data Collection, simply accept the warning and continue.
Now at this stage a lot of people would add the application they are trying to personalize into the Applications | Application Categories | User section and then Whitelist it for their target Personalization Group, but this shouldn't be done. The Config Assistant will only gather data on applications that aren't whitelisted, and when you create the template, any existing entry in the Application Categories | User section will be overwritten anyway, so neither of these actions is necessary.
The next step would be to make sure that the Global Includes and Excludes in your Personalization Server are set to the lowest level possible (i.e. - nothing and everything). Now, as mentioned earlier, please don't blithely change these options in an environment where applications are already personalized and being used - there's a very good chance you will break the existing Personalization. Ideally, you should set these options as you begin your initial Personalization discovery process. You will find that each application will take a little bit more work when you use the Global Includes and Excludes in this way - but after a period of time, you will realize your Personalization database is leaner and meaner than it would have been with the default options left set. In some environments, where the Personalization database has become bloated and unwieldy, I have seen clients who opted to create a new Personalization database and re-import all their applications by following this process, and then moved their existing users across to the new database.
The Global Includes and Excludes (which are found in the root of the Applications tab, on the left-hand pane in the User Personalization part of the Environment Manager console) configured in this aggressive format should look like this:-
 |
| Registry Global Includes |
 |
| Folder Global Includes |
 |
| Registry Global Excludes |
 |
| Folder Global Excludes |
I must proffer an apology to Richard Thompson at this point. As I am currently working on a live system with no access to my test lab, I had to steal the previous four screenshots from his own blog article regarding best practices for Personalization. It's a good article and can be found at this link. Sorry Richard :-)
Next we are going to pick an application to capture data for. In the interests of keeping this article as simple as possible, we will go for the time-honoured lite version of Word that nobody ever uses but is present on just about every Windows system since the 90s - Microsoft WordPad.
First we will log on as a test user and run WordPad. Initially we will run it and find a setting that we can change so that we can see where it writes these settings to. Ideally, with every application you should explore as much functionality as possible - particularly functionality that interacts with other applications and other parts of the operating system. For purposes of this demo, first we will open WordPad as normal
and then we will turn off the options that show the rulers and the status bar, before adding a few items to the Quick Access Toolbar
Once we've done that, we need to make our way across to the system where we have installed the Config Assistant. The installation of the Config Assistant was covered in the previous article I did on this, so we won't need to go through that again now. Start the Config Assistant as normal
and click the Connect button, which shows you the following screen
(don't forget to specify Server\Instance, rather than just Server as in the screenshot). Click OK to connect to the data which has been collected, which will show you a summary screen before reaching the main window. As mentioned in my previous article on the Config Assistant, I normally use the Reset function from the Maintenance menu as soon as I enter the main part of the interface, but I am still not sure whether this is absolutely necessary in the latest version. It certainly was necessary on the 8.2 system I tried it on :-)
Now we can click on the Current Applications menu on the left-hand side and see if any data has been collected for our WordPad application.
Excellent! There it is. So now I will click on the Application Registry Usage menu item to see what Registry keys it has been reading from and writing to (the Reads and Writes are denoted by the respective columns in the screenshot)
and just for posterity, clicking the Application Folder Usage menu item will show which folders in the filesystem it has been reading from and writing to (again, there are separate columns)
Well, there would be separate columns, but as you can see from the screenshot the No data available message indicates that the application hasn't actually read from or written to the filesystem at all.
Anyway, let's assume we are happy with the data we've captured. How do we get information for a particular application that we've captured from the Config Assistant into the Personalization Server console, and hence, the database? This is where the nifty little utility called the Configuration Assistant Template Creator comes into play, which we will just refer to as the Template Creator from now on. It's a standalone executable with an accompanying config file that you can download from MyAppSense on this link.
Once you've downloaded and extracted the two files (no installation is required), you simply need to run the executable, where you will be confronted with a screen where you can supply the database server name (and instance, if necessary), and the name of the database itself
Once you click the Submit button, assuming you haven't made any typos or something is blocking the connection to the relevant ports, you should see a screen something like this
The Template Creator interface shows you a list of applications which data is available for on the left, the version numbers in the centre, and the captured Registry keys and folders on the right. You can select the application you require and the version number by clicking on them, and then you can multi-select the Registry keys and folders you wish to add to the template. In this example, we don't want to keep the Registry keys that reference Adobe Acrobat (it's interesting to see some of the strange places that do get written to by applications!), so we will select the rest of the Registry keys as shown below
and then click the Create Template button to save it to an XML file. The interface will ask you for a location and filename, as you'd expect.
Next we head back to the Environment Manager Console window, in the User Personalization section, and locate the Tools | Import button
Select the XML file you created earlier for import. Next you will be presented with the following warning, which you can suppress if you are planning on doing a lot of these. As you should be working on a test or pre-live database with a good backup strategy, you shouldn't need to worry too much about anything going awry.
Then you will see the Configuration Import window. As we haven't grouped any applications together, we opt not to import the Application Group, simply the User Applications. Naturally, if you had used the Config Assistant to group some applications up, you should use the Application Groups option.
Now, as I was doing this to a test database that already had some applications added to the User section, I didn't realise wordpad.exe already existed in there. But handily, this gave me a dialog that you might see if you're in the same or a similar situation. When a conflict is detected, you can opt to Replace or Skip - I've obviously selected the Replace option
Finally you will get this warning that reminds you that you should have a backup in case anything goes horribly wrong
Once the import successfully completes after you click OK (and despite all the warnings, I've yet to see one go horribly wrong - although that isn't an excuse for you to avoid backups!), you can now view your application or application group and see that the Registry and Folder Includes and Excludes have been nicely configured for you
 |
| Registry Includes and Excludes from the imported template |
 |
| Folder Includes and Excludes from the imported template |
Now this takes us on to another interesting point - the consolidation of Registry keys and folders. In the example above, we are capturing a large amount of Registry keys under two particular parent keys. Now if a root folder is selected, there's no need to select child keys or folders. However, in this case, as the root key is \applets\WordPad, there's a good chance that the entire root key is both relevant and required. So I will use a bit of common sense and condense the Registry Includes and Excludes to the following
So now for the big question - will the Personalization Server now save my data? Well, I log back in as my test user, run WordPad again and hide the rulers as well as adding lots of items to the Quick Access Toolbar - and then I close WordPad and log out. When I log in again and run WordPad, what do I see?
Excellent! As you can see from the screenshot, all of the Quick Access Toolbar is being restored, and I also don't see the rulers or the status bar.
So, now you can take this process and apply it to all of your applications to get them Personalized in as streamlined a way as possible. Personalization done in this way takes time and effort - but it is worth it, as you maintain good application load and response times, and keep the Personalization database from growing beyond control.
I think it would be an idea for Personalization Server to be configurable in a couple of different modes - POC Mode, which would turn on a lot of Global Includes and Excludes like it does at the moment, and Production Mode, which makes the defaults as we have configured in the article you've just read. That's something for AppSense to look into for future releases maybe, I will certainly try and run it by them.
Additionally, I am hoping to publish a few XML files soon which should allow you to import the settings for commonly-used applications into your Personalization Server console which should hopefully reduce the amount of time it takes to get a Personalization infrastructure up and running. I am currently testing a few of these and should have some published in the near future.