Parallels Browser Isolation: Applications

Administering applications in PPI is pretty straightforward. Every application has a tile in the admin pane that corresponds to an icon the user would see when they log in. I can enable and disable an application by using a simple toggle switch so that when the user then refreshes the application either appears or disappears depending on what the administrator has chosen. Each application has a series of settings so I can view the application. I can also edit the application configuration from here and we'll see that in just a second what the options are available there. We can copy the application URL. Now we will come back to that a little bit later. We can delete the application from here as well. Now importantly there are two types of application I can publish with PPI. A secure browser and a secure web application. A secure browser gives a user a location bar at the top and they can navigate to other domains by default. A secure web application does not. It restricts the user to that URL on its own by default. So let's just have a look at both those applications in action. I'm adding a secure browser application here so I can select an icon file if I want to. I put in the URL for where I want that browser application to point to. In this case I'm looking at office.com. Now I can add users here. I can select all users or some users depending on what I want to do. I can also do the same with groups. So these are the groups that are coming from your identity provider that you've configured already. We can also configure policies here. Now policies are going to be covered in a separate section so we'll come back to that a little bit later. Now if I configure a secure web application very very similar options inside the secure web application. So I give it a name. This time I'm going to just for the sake of this video refer to the fact that this is a web application. Point it to the URL that I want it to start in and then just as before we can choose the users or the groups that are coming from the IDP. Now if we have a little look at what visual difference that makes to the user. If we just refresh that page you can see the applications have appeared. If I open the browser application the thing to note here when I'm launching a secure browser app is the location bar across the top. So I've got that blue location bar and I can sign in. I can do what I'd normally do but this connection itself is secured. That's the point of a secure browser application. The connection is secured. With a web app not only is the connection secured but I'm not letting the user navigate to any other URL through this connection unless I have enabled it. So they get no location bar across the top and now when I try and sign in because that's going to a different URL to do the sign-in process that is not permitted. So that's blocked by default. Now obviously that's not practical because that means a user can't sign into their application but we're going to rectify that now. So we're going to edit the web app and one of the settings a web app gets that you don't get with a secure browser is this allowed domains option. So I can add domains in addition to the starting URL which allow my user to operate that application successfully. So I can add them manually. I can add them either individually or from a file or I can do what's called auto discover and what auto discover is going to do is it's going to launch the application in effectively a kind of learning mode which I then click on the buttons or the links or go about my kind of business process navigating around the parts of the application that I as an administrator want my user to be able to navigate and it's capturing those URLs. So now it said okay well these are the URLs that were instigated as part of the action you did. I update that. That is now inside my secure web app. Now you don't need to do that with a secure browser because by default secure browser is clicking the opposite stance. It's allowing all those domains and then I can restrict which domains I access. So now I reopen the same web app but I've added those two extra URLs because I need my user to be able to log in. Now when they sign in it completes successfully because I've allowed those URLs to be part of the application. That concludes this section on PBI applications.