Summer is in full swing, and for a good chunk of our community that means the office is quiet, out of office replies are on, and someone is doing their best not to think about the next Chrome release from a beach chair. Whether you are on vacation or the one holding down the fort while everyone else is gone, the applications your users depend on do not take the season off.
Neither does the work of managing them. So, to help make the summer a breeze, we’re introducing Application Workspace 4.5 with two new additions: App Settings, available as part of the Access Manager license add-on, and elevated user permissions to run Windows actions.
Settings that pack their own bag: App Settings
Picture one of your users on their first day back after two weeks away. They sign in on a replaced machine, open the application they practically live in, and everything they had set up is… gone. Toolbars reset. Preferences blank. Months of small productivity adjustments wiped out like footprints at high tide.
Next, your phone rings or Teams lights up. It’s someone asking where their toolbar went, or why the template folder they point at every morning is empty, or how to get the sidebar back on the left where it belongs. Small things, individually. But they add up across everyone filtering in and out on summer leave, and across every shared or non-persistent device in your environment. It’s a recurring tax on the people you support, and on you.
App Settings addresses that. Application preferences follow your users across sessions and devices automatically, without interruption and without rebuilding settings that otherwise revert to defaults.
Deciding what travels starts on the App Settings page, where you create an entry and then use the Contents tab to add the items you want to capture. You can capture six types of items:
- Folder Tree syncs an entire directory on the file system recursively.
- Folder syncs a defined directory but not its subdirectories.
- File syncs a single defined file.
- Registry Tree syncs all the keys in an entire registry tree recursively.
- Registry Key syncs all the keys in a registry key, but not those contained in subkeys.
- Registry Value syncs a defined registry value.
Wildcards are also supported in folder and file paths. Plenty of applications bury their settings behind a folder named with a GUID, a version number, or a string that changes with every install. Using wildcards, you can match the pattern instead of the exact path and capture it anyway.
You can also exclude items, which may be the part that saves you the most grief. If an application drops a bulky cache, backup, or log folder inside a path you are capturing, you can leave it out instead of dragging it along for every session.
We recommend a single App Settings entry per application, which makes the captured and restored data easier to manage over time. If you deliver the same application through multiple packages, such as different language variants, you can reuse that single entry across each one so that the same settings apply wherever the application is deployed. Track which packages have App Settings applied on the Auditing and Packages pages. For more details, walk through the full setup here.
On the access side, the administrator access policy now includes privileges for creating, viewing, modifying, and removing App Settings, plus adding, viewing, modifying, and removing App Settings content. That means you can scope who has access to this feature rather than handing it to everyone at once. Application Workspace currently captures and restores the full settings set each time rather than only what changed, so start with the applications where consistency matters most.
Beat the heat on admin escalations: Elevated permissions for Windows actions
Sometimes it’s just nice to beat the heat. Ticket heat, that is. You know the ones: “I need to install this and it won’t let me.” The usual fixes are time-consuming and potentially risky. Hand over a local admin password, drop the user into the local Administrator group and hope you remember to take them back out, or write a workaround script and maintain it forever.
Application Workspace 4.5 gives you a better option. You can temporarily elevate non-administrator users, letting them run specific actions as the logged-on user with elevated privileges. No manual group membership changes, and no workaround scripts.
Actions you can enable with user privilege elevation:
- Install MSI, Install Uploaded MSI, Uninstall MSI
- Install MSP, Install Uploaded MSP
- Install Font, Install Uploaded Font
- Start Process, Start Uploaded Process
- Create Registry Key, Delete Registry Key
- Set Registry Value, Delete Registry Value
From the user’s side, nothing looks different. They launch their app the way they always do, and it starts instead of failing with a permissions error.
Keep in mind that elevating privileges is a decision, not a default. Before you turn this on, read through the security considerations and the inherent risks that come with user privilege elevation, and scope this to the specific actions and audiences where it earns its keep.
In case you missed it: June quality release
If you were out when this landed, June brought a quality release to both Application Workspace 4.4 and 4.3. This release included many bug fixes along with important security fixes and reliability improvements.
A few worth calling out:
- OData feed fixes. Date and time filtering now works correctly. In 4.4, paging also respects your defined page size rather than limiting views to 2000 records per page.
- Satellite Server connects to Configuration Manager without throwing exceptions.
- macOS improvements. The macOS installer no longer fails due to a certificate error, and applications now launch successfully when the system language is set to Norsk Bokmål.
- SharePoint web part. You can now add Application Workspace to your SharePoint Workspace integration.
- PowerShell fix. The PowerShell Module’s LiquitEntityFilter cmdlets now correctly set the operator to “And” instead of “Or”, which had quietly changed the behavior of some automation.
- Workspace content loads without device registration issues or Dal_Unexpected errors.
- Cleaner sign-in. Users no longer see multiple windows briefly close and reopen in different onscreen locations when logging in.
The full list is worth a skim in the 4.4.4286 release notes or 4.3.4286 release notes.
One more thing you may have missed
The June release also carried a support lifecycle note: Application Workspace 4.2 has reached end-of-life. If you are still running it, consider this your friendly nudge to plan an upgrade.
Upgrade timeline: Mark your calendar
Here is when you can get your hands on Application Workspace 4.5:
- On-prem customers: Upgrade via system updates or the download page starting August 19th.
- Cloud customers: Upgrades available beginning October 1st.
Conclusion: Application Workspace 4.5 is here
Application Workspace 4.5 is about taking friction out of the day. App Settings removes it for your users, who stop rebuilding setups they already built. Elevated permissions remove it for you, or whoever’s covering the queue while half the team is out, by closing out a category of ticket that should never have needed support in the first place.
Before we blow this popsicle stand, a quick thank you to our community. App Settings is here because you kept asking for it, and that’s genuinely how features get built. If there’s something you want to see next, the ideas portal is where it starts. If you want to dig into everything the release notes have to offer, take a closer look here.
If you’re new to Application Workspace or want to see the whole picture, this is a great time to get started. Explore Application Workspace to discover how Recast simplifies device onboarding and unifies application delivery across Windows, macOS, and virtual environments.
