Migrating from Persona Management to UEM

[Rdiaz29]

Hi,

Setup:

• Horizon View 7.3.2 (using Persona Management component of the View Agent)
• Desktops: Windows 7 (64-bit)

We are preparing to migrate from Windows 7 with Persona Management (PM) to Windows 10 with UEM 9.3.0. I followed this KB (https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2118056 ) to capture Windows 7 settings using UEM. Therefore, my test pool of desktops have PM (using View Agent) and UEM 9.3.0 installed. When I log into a Windows 7 Desktop that has PM and UEM installed and I launch Firefox, I notice that I get a brand new profile, effectively losing my bookmarks and Firefox setup. I notice that a brand new profile got created in C:\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles, even though an existing profile already existed (loaded by PM). I also notice that the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini file got overwritten and within the file it points to the brand new profile that was just created. I am able to manually recover by modifying to profiles.ini to point to my original Firefox profile, but this is unacceptable when migrating hundreds of users. I also notice that I lose my pinned tabs in Chrome. Now I am wondering what other applications will run into problems when launched for the first time when both PM and UEM are running at the same time. This only happens when I have PM and UEM installed/running at the same time.

It appears PM is loading the profile fine, but I suspect UEM is causing the application to not honor what already exists in the local profile. As a reminder, this is the very first login for the user with UEM, so the user only has an empty UEM archive folder with nothing in it. When the user logs off, that is when everything gets saved to the UEM archive (hence the UEM Advanced GPO).

Hopefully this makes sense and someone has some insight. Thank you for your time.

[Pim_van_de_Vis]

If the UEM profile archive folder for the user is empty, there are no ZIP to to import and UEM will not perform any action when you launch Firefox, Chrome or any other applications. So it must be something else that interferes in this case.

Can you share a UEM logfile from a testuser in debug mode that contains at least 1 logoff and 1 logon?

[Ray_handels]

What we did is just export settings when logging off with UEM so we don't import the data within W7, might be an option?

[Pim_van_de_Vis]

That is an option, but don't forget to add the -F parameter to the UEM logoff script in that case to force the export. Otherwise it will be skipped since it did not detect a successful import.

[Rdiaz29 · Accepted solution]

So I figured out my problem. I enabled debugging and noticed that for Chrome and Firefox I was using pre-defined settings. When UEM was processing them, it was loading the application's File System and/or registry settings on first login. I don't really need the pre-defined settings, especially since I need this migration to work. I removed the pre-defined setting and things are working like a charm!