How to: Change the view of Mozille Firefox options menu

Today I’ve upgraded Mozilla Firefox from version 35.0.1 to 38.0.5. After the succesfully upgrade, everythin looks fine. But there’s one crucial thing that has been changed in version 38.x. The “Options” menu is not a pane anymore, but it will be open in a new tab. I’ve customized some things in the browser (hide the network button) in the UserChrome.css file. In the new Options tab, the netwerk button is available again for my users. So, I want to hide this option and it works great in version 35.x.

With a simple edit in the UserPref.js file within the profile of my users, I can force the “Options” menu view in the ‘old’ way. After that, the network button is gone again!! 🙂

I’ve used RES Workspace Manager 2014 for distribution the new UserPref.js file to all of my users, but you can also use some other 3th party software or do it just manually.

1.) Open Mozilla Firefox 38.x
2.) Type about:config
3.) Search for “browser.preferences.inc
4.) Set the option “Browser.preferences.inContent” from true to false
5.) Close Mozilla Firefox and open it again

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Can’t start Sticky Notes in Windows 8.1 with RES Workspace Manager 2014

Last week I’ve been working on a big VDI environment with RES Workspace Manager 2014, Windows 8 and VMWare Horizon View. Everything looks realy nice and is working realy well!! But I’ve seen one strange thing. One of the applications “Sticky Notes” couldn’t be started from the start menu or Windows tiles. In this blogpost you’ll find a solution for this problem.

1.) Add Sticky Notes to RES Workspace Manager 2014
2.) Open the Properties of the new application and navigate to the second tab “Settings
3.) Scroll down to “Disable file system redirector on 64-bit systems” and Enable this setting
4.) Refresh the User Workspace and start the application again
5.) Sticky Notes can now be used

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How to: Set Microsoft Office initials with Active Directory information using RES Workspace Manager 2014

When you’ve installed Microsoft Office in your environment, the first time the user starts one of the Office products, they receive a pop-up box for the initials. Default there are two things the user has to fill in. The username and the initials. The username is the displayname within Active Directory. The initials is the first letter of the username. But, what if you want to fill this field also with some Active Directory information, like the property Initials.

In this environment I’m using RES Workspace Manager 2014, so there’re also possibilities to set some user variables in your session. First I’ve created a new environment variable with a query to read the information from Active Directory.

1.) Open the RES Workspace Manager Console and create a new environment variable. In my example it is Initials
2.) Give the new variable the following value $adinfo(Initials) There’re some more values possible, like firstname, lastname, etc….
3.) Login to your session, in my example a Windows 8.1 VDI desktop and open the command prompt
4.) Type the command set and search for the new variable Initials. It’s the information from the Active Directory
5.) Now return to the RES Workspace Manager Console and create a new User Setting (User Registry)
6.) The values are stored in the following registrykey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Common\Userinfo
7.) Add this path in the new registry setting and create two new REG_SZ keys
UserInitials with the value %Initials%
Username
with the value %Username%
8.) Configure the Access Control and the Workspace Container
9.) Login again into a new session and start Microsoft Office, for example Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc…
10.) Open the options and take a look at the user initials.

This is a realy powerfull solution to control your users initials. You can choose to apply the User Registry settings once, so the users are able to edit the initials. You can use a User Preference to store this information in a .UPR (User Preference) with RES Workspace Manager.

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Why is my RES Workspace Manager database growing that fast….??

Last week I was troubleshooting a RES Workspace Manager 2012 environment by one of our customers. A couple of times in one week, the datadisk of the SQL server was full, so at that time the SQL environment was not running anymore. The database of RES Workspace Manager was growing that fast….but why??

When looking for the actually size of the database, I saw that the size is just above the 20 GB. That’s pretty big if you ask me! The biggest data is the “logging” section. Okay…but which logging?? Sinds a few years, there’s a great tool available called DBLogCleanup. This tool has been written by Patrick van Grinsven and is extremely usefull for troubleshooting this kind of stuff.

http://resguru.com/2014/02/new-utility-db-cleanup-tool/

Just run the tool, make a connection to your SQL environment and select the RES Workspace Manager database. At the log section, select “User Settings Sampling mode data“. As you can see, there were over the 16 million items in the database! The process iexplore.exe with the AppGUID 02222….6862 is growing realy fast!! So there’s a lot of User Sampling data in the database. After deleting the sampling data, the size of the database was 10 GB smaller.

1.) Run the DBLogCleanup Tool
2.) Fill in the SQL server, database, user and password
3.) Select the section you want to view
4.) Browse through the processes and note the AppGUID
5.) Open your RES Workspace Manager Console
6.) Navigate to your applications and find the specific AppGUID
7.) Open the properties of the application
8.) Navigate to User Settings and open the Sampling tab
9.) In the right corner hit “clear all sampled data”
10.) Make sure you turn off the sampling mode for that application

Conclusion: make sure you do not use sampling mode for a very long time! All the sampled data is stored in your database, so the database is growing very fast!!

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