I’m back with episode #3 of Ron’s Cool Feature of the Week.  In this series, I talk with VMware product managers, engineers, and field engineers to dig into and find cool and sometimes overlooked features within our product stacks. Some of these will be new and exciting with lots of fanfare, and others may just be a cool feature that I think has been overlooked, but has the ability to really impact the average admin that is dealing with our technology on a daily basis. You can see the rest of the series – including the Dynamic Environment Manager Condition Engine and Apps On-Demand – on my author page.

This week I get a chance to talk with Andrew Morgan, a teammate of mine and a Staff Engineer in the EUC Office of the CTO. Andrew is well known in the community for his “flings,” and had the opportunity to productize one of the most used ones, Horizon Session Recording.

Session recording was initially thought of as a “nice to have,” or maybe even an interesting opportunity for third parties to create something with an API we would make available. Andrew saw it as an interesting challenge and something he could write vs. just waiting for a partner to create something. That started a multi-month (not multi-year, yet) journey with him as the sole developer of a completely new feature in Horizon. No scrum teams. No support staff. Just Andrew learning as he went. This video is a little longer than normal, but the story of this feature and the demo are worth it!

If you’ve ever thought it would be nice to have a complete recording of a user’s session for troubleshooting or need to be able to record sessions for compliance, audit, or security reasons, this feature is something you should look at right now.

For more information, Checkout the installation and admin guide here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Horizon/2106/virtual-desktops/GUID-DE409B35-A487-48A1-BEBF-02CA400FA119.html