Today, many employees are still working outside company offices and workplaces, which has created huge demand for remote access to corporate resources from BYO or personal devices. However, many customers are concerned about allowing employees’ personal devices accessing company resources in a secure manner. They worry about issues like screenshots and printing, and can sometimes be difficult to trace bad behavior.

The watermark feature in VMware Horizon can give some peace of mind. A digital watermark distinguishes information that is burned into the background of a virtual desktop or remote app. Customers can create a unique digital watermark for verification, content integrity, and ownership protection of their intellectual property.

Today, we’re announcing enhancements to our watermarking capabilities, including the ability to protect documents printed from a Horizon session. These enhancements add to other recent features to protect access from personal devices, such as our key logger blocker for macOS clients.

Watermarking in both Windows and Linux VMs

A watermark in Horizon is implemented through the Horizon Agent. Watermark images are generated on the agent and sent to the client to display if the client supports watermarks. For older versions of clients that don’t support client-side watermarking, the agent will create and display a watermark.

Watermarking can work in the following scenarios:

• Published applications and applications running on a desktop pool
• Virtual desktops and RDS hosts
• Nested mode
• Multiple monitors
• Primary session in a collaborative session

Admins can enable and configure watermark features, such as the text content, image layout, text rotation, opacity, and margin by editing the group policy settings. 

Watermark Enhancements

In the Horizon 2203 release, enhancements to watermarking have been made available.

With the new Horizon Agent Group Policy setting, admins can change the color and font of the watermark text, and the text border color. The new setting will be loaded when a session starts to generate watermark images. By default, the watermark text is rendered in white and a black outline.

A separate but complementary enhancement is that an admin can embed a specific watermark into printed documents. This function works with VMware Integrated Printing (VIP) Universal Printing Driver (UPD) solution. The watermark is a new tab added in the printing UI for admins to add or edit text to print overlayed on content. This extends the value of watermark features to potentially new use cases.

Learn More

Check out configuring watermarking in Horizon and the Horizon 8 2203 release notes.