Capture files outside of user profile with VMware UEM

This example will help you to capture the OpenCRM Outlook plugin user specific files using VMware UEM (User Environment Manager). This guide will allow you to capture user name and password details so they do not need to be re-entered into the Outlook plugin. further details can be found here on the VMware Technology Network forums where I asked the question originally on how to make this work. https://communities.vmware.com/thread/553070?sr=stream&ru=2602597

The Problem

VMware UEM only allows the capture of files that reside within the users profile, for example any files below the folder path and including c:\users\%username% . OpenCRM stores user specific data in the plugin installation directory in c:\program files (x86)\opencrmoladdin\ as shown below

There is also a registry key created in the HKCU hive as below

The Solution

As discussed on the VMTN forums in the link at the beginning of this post, there is workaround for this problem.

We can run a task to copy the data from the default path to a temporary path in the user profile and then restore this data when Outlook is next launched.

First step, for this to work DirectFlex needs to be enabled. DirectFlex only works if it detects a specified Executable name is running. As this is an Outlook plugin DLL file, I opted to add the Direct Flex configuration to the existing Outlook 2016 config in UEM

The Pre-Export and Post-Import tasks are defined on the User Environment tab

Lets take a closer look at how these 2 settings are configured

Pre-Export – This is the configuration option that will copy the data into a directory in the user profile

Which will copy the files to the following path

 

Post-Import – This is the configuration option that will copy the data back to the original directory

There is one final step required to tie all of this together. The HKCU registry key needs to be captured as well as the folder that has been copied into the user profile directory. I created a new application configuration file to deal with these last 2 elements. They could be combined with the Outlook application profile in this example if required.

Notice the IncludeFolderTrees captures data residing in %appdata%\OpenCRM which is the location specified in the XCOPY command above.

I hope this post was useful.

Ian

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1 Response

  1. Doug Wilson says:

    Thanks, I will give this a try. I have the same type problem with another app.

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