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!!

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.

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

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