*This post originally appeared on the AppSense blog prior to the rebrand in January 2017, when AppSense, LANDESK, Shavlik, Wavelink, and HEAT Software merged under the new name Ivanti.

Now that the excitement of VMworld is behind us, let’s get back to our regular schedule of new Best Desktop Ever goodness.

As an IT team, you’ll be hard pressed to find something that will make life easier as much as reducing the number of users with full admin rights to their PCs. When you use privilege management to maximize the number of standard, tightly managed PCs in your environment, help desk calls get easier and zero day malware becomes much less effective.

However, these benefits too often come at the expense of user experience. A locked down PC is generally functional for standard user workflows. But as your user base grows, and becomes more mobile, the number of standard workflows multiplies in both variety and complexity.

This means trying to strike a balance between security and uninterrupted productivity can feel a little like this:

AppSense Application Manager helps with this by letting you remove full admin rights and selectively elevate just the privileges that users need to get their job done. We even have some clever tools for monitoring your environment to understand what privileges people require, so you can bake them into your central privilege management policy proactively.

The problem is that neither AppSense or you can predict every possible future, and users are incredibly “talented” at finding new ways to push the boundaries of IT policy if it’s in the way getting work done.

Application Manager makes it easy to adapt your policy on the fly, but what about those situations when a user is offline? Or, what if it’s off hours at a time when your Application Manager guru is gone for the day?

Fortunately, there’s now an App…..lication Manager feature for that. Let’s take a look:

Now you have one more powerful tool in your toolbox for responding quickly to user needs without resorting to full admin rights. Users can request specific privileges right from their current work context. From there, a quick phone chat with the help desk gets them the privileges they need to be productive, even if they’re offline.

Best of all, fulfillment of these requests can be delegated to level 1 help desk staff. Even though our products are easier to use than ever, your AppSense administrator still works hard. You have to let them sleep… sometimes… on occasion… every other Tuesday, maybe.

On-demand privilege request functionality is now available in the latest version of AppSense Application Manager. Existing customers can grab it over on our MyAppSense extranet.

If you’re not yet an AppSense customer, you can begin the process of correcting that by requesting a demo at AppSense.com.