Brian Madden has created an article that walks you through using Microsoft’s SoftGrid product to sequence or virtualise Microsoft Office 2007 in 30 easy to follow steps.
It is worth a read even if you don’t own SoftGrid as the concepts can be applied to other Application Virtualisation products. I used the section about tweaking the virtual registry (step 24in ThinApp and it worked a treat.
Read it here. Thanks Brian!!
Application Virtualisation, Microsoft
I don’t get chance to use ThinApp (Thinstall) as much as I used to, but I’ve had a couple of conversations where people have asked me for the real benefits and downsides.
I’m not one for re-inventing the wheel, so here are links to the excellent articles written by 4sysops.
Advantages of Application Virtualisation
Disadvantages of Application Virtualisation
Outlines are below:
Advantages
- Application retirement simplified
- No installation required
- No more application conflicts
- No registry and system bloat
- Multiple runtime environments
- Multiple versions of the same application
- Deploy apps on unmanaged computers
- Simplified OS deployment
- Operating system independent
Disadvantages
- A new complexity layer
- Vendor might deny support
- Problematic apps
- Shell integration
- Bandwidth requirements
- Costs
As you can see valid points for both sides of the argument, I personally believe that the benefits far outweigh the negatives. The main stumbling block I see is that companies may struggle to justify allocating resource to this task alone.
Application Virtualisation
Xenocode have released a new version of their Virtual Application Studio and it has some really great features now to rival VMware’s ThinApp including:
- Deploy complex apps in a single executable
- Stream with no infrastructure changes
- Execute .NET and Java with no runtime
- Run legacy applications on Vista
- Execute on locked-down desktops
- Completely user mode implementation
- Leverage existing management tools
Read the rest of this entry
Application Virtualisation, ThinApp, Xenocode