Archive for the ‘RES Workspace Manager’ Category

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How to: Removing Windows 8.1 Modern Apps with PowerShell

When you install a default Windows 8.1 machine, there’re a few modern apps available. In some environments, you want
to remove these modern apps for your users.

With the following steps, you can delete specific apps or all the modern apps.

1.) To get a overview off all the package, use the following command:
Get-AppxPackage | ft Name, PackageFullName -AutoSize
2.) Let’s remove the Finance modern app
Remove-AppxPackage -Package Microsoft.BingFinance_3.0.1.172_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe -Confirm:$false
3.) Return to the start menu and now you’ll see the Finance app is gone
4.) To remove all the modern apps, use the following command:
Get-AppxPackage | Remove-AppxPackage -Confirm:$false

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How to: Remove “settings” button in Mozilla Firefox

In some scenario’s you want to remove some buttons within the options of Mozilla Firefox. Because there are not that enhanced group policies for Mozilla Firefox, you’ve to script something. In my example I’ve used RES Workspace Manager to distribute the modified files, but you can also use something else. For example: PowerShell, batchfiles or Group Policy Preferences.

You can edit the file userChrome.css in the folder AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Profiles\<nameofyourprofile>\chrome to tweak the menu settings within Mozilla Firefox. In my example I’ve added the following rule:
/* Remove connection button */
#connectionSettings { display: nome !important; }

When you open Mozilla Firefox the next time, the “Settings” is gone! 🙂

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1.) Open the RES Workspace Manager 2014 Console
2.) Navigate to Compsotion \ User Settings
3.) Create a new setting named: Save Windows Tiles
4.) Add the following two files to be saved


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


1.) Add Sticky Notes to RES Workspace Manager 2014
4.) Refresh the User Workspace and start the application again
5.) Sticky Notes can now be used






6.) The values are stored in the following registrykey:
UserInitials with the value %Initials%
with the value %Username%
8.) Configure the Access Control and the Workspace Container





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.

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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