As some of you may be aware, in ZENworks 2016 we are doing a major overhaul of the end user interface for the ZENworks desktop experience for Windows and OS-X. We are basically building a new application to replace the ZENworks Application Launcher and surface other important user driven capabilities. This is the first in what I am sure will be a series of blogs about where we are going with this. My goal is to provide periodic updates and get feedback. As we start to get working code, I also suspect I’ll be putting together a few small focus groups via GoToMeeting to get some rapid feedback. In the meantime, I encourage you to submit your comments about the new design.

In this post I want to show you the new experience for when a user chooses to install an application. That starts with the user at the new and improved ZENworks User Application (the replacement for the ZENworks Application Launcher) as shown below:



The user can either double click the application or can right-click the application and click Install. This will begin to transact the bundle. I’m sure most of you are familiar with that experience, but following new metaphors common in the mobile world, we’ve decided to overhaul things a bit as you can see from the next picture:



Here you can see the progress bar overlaid on the icon, indicating that application is being installed. If multiple apps are being installed at the same time it would look like this:



Additionally, if a user wants a more comprehensive look at what’s going on they can choose to view the Installation status from the hamburger menu, which will result in something that looks like this:



From here the user can easily cancel an update, view errors that occurred, suspend a distribution and more. Keep in mind that the branding you see is the default branding, but we anticipate you'll be able to change almost all of the branding including the title bar, icon, colors – basically everything except the About box in the help screen. You’ll also notice few other things like a global search to help users find their applications, and we plan new capabilities such as favoriting and both end user and administrator tagging of applications.

What do you think? Does this feel like ZENworks for 2016? We want to hear your thoughts so we can make sure we are moving down the right path. Expect to start to get your hands dirty with this as we rev the ZENworks 2016 Preview late this year. Don’t forget to register for access to the ZENworks 2016 Preview program here.