Organisations using Ivanti Workspace Control (formerly RES Software) have known for some time that the widely used User Environment Management solution will reach end of life on 31 December. This leaves many organisations facing a critical question: how should they manage the user environment going forward? Without a suitable alternative, they risk compliance and security issues, increasing operational complexity, and delays to their modern workplace roadmap.
Ivanti Workspace Control is a product that has seen limited development in recent years. Although several attempts have been made to phase it out since Ivanti acquired RES Software in 2017, it now appears that the end is definitive. Ivanti is discontinuing a product line that played a major role in the rise of the virtualisation market, marking the end of an era that began in a barn on a farm in The Netherlands in 1999, with the very first version of PowerMenu.
Ivanti Workspace Control customers must now decide whether to replace the solution. Microsoft Intune is sometimes mentioned as an alternative, but for many organisations it does not provide sufficient capabilities to manage context-aware dependencies or organisation-specific configurations. A few examples:
Security: An obvious point, but no less important. A UEM solution helps reduce user-related risks by enabling contextual controls, such as restricting access to applications and data based on network, location or device, or enforcing specific security policies per context. These capabilities also support compliance with frameworks such as NIS2 and NEN 7510.
Migrations: In the world of the digital workplace, change is the only constant. Migrations — whether between Windows versions or to entirely new platforms — require time, resources and careful risk management. Decoupling user profiles from the operating system and making them universally portable helps maintain productivity during these transitions. With a UEM solution, profiles can be stored, modified and restored in a new environment without disrupting users.
(Cost) efficiency and continuity: Many organisations still spend significant time manually configuring user environments, resulting in high administrative overhead. Contextual settings often rely on scripts, with critical knowledge held by a single individual. Using UEM alongside standard Unified Endpoint Management tooling (such as Microsoft Intune or Omnissa Workspace ONE) simplifies and extends management. Without the need for scripting, administrators save considerable time — reducing tasks that once took hours to just minutes.
Improved user experience: When user settings are tied to a profile rather than a device, users always get a consistent, personalised workspace — whether they are working on a shared device, in the cloud or on a physical workstation. Changes can be applied almost in real time, further enhancing the user experience.
Many tools cover only parts of the IWCl functionality. ProfileUnity is designed as a full UEM platform, offering a one-to-one replacement for IWC with greater flexibility and broader platform support. Its multi-platform architecture makes it particularly suitable for hybrid environments. By decoupling user profiles from the operating system, ProfileUnity enables universal portability across platforms and OS versions, delivering a scalable, multi-tenant solution for contextual user environment management.
Many organisations have already migrated from IWC to ProfileUnity, including The Municipality of Haarlemmermeer, where highly specific use cases are supported. To further simplify these projects, Liquidware has developed its own conversion tool, allowing IWC Building Blocks to be directly converted to ProfileUnity. This makes migrations faster, more efficient and less error-prone.