Seeing is believing – watch this 20 minute recorded demonstration of the AppTitude application testing and application remediation platform to learn how to accelerate your Windows 7, Microsoft App-V, Citrix XenApp, 64x, Windows Server and IE8 projects. . Video here (one-time registration required).

Learn how to configure App-V; create, publish, and update virtual applications; and create and manage policies for virtual applicationss. The videos can be downloaded from here

I’m just about to expand my knowledge a bit around App-V. I haven’t done any hands-on yet, because I usually first focus on gathering all the useful resources available on the net, and then start reading these. By doing so, I found these fantastic videos on The Blogcast Repository.

Deployment Scenarios with App-V 4.5
Planning Considerations before Implementing App-V 4.5
The App-V Client (part 1)
The App-V Client Part 2- Deep Dive

By the way, if you are not familiar with The Blogcast Repository but like video based trainings, have a look at the Repository, there is lots of other Microsoft related Technology training material there.

Adobe Flash and Shockwave are probably one of those most installed applications on home and enterprise computers. Working within the End User Computing environment for large enterprise customers since quite a while, I can’t remember of just one company that wouldn’t maintain Adobe Flash and Shockwave in their list of enterprise standard applications.

But when it comes to distributing these applications, many companies seem to go down the difficult route instead of taking the easy one. When distributing applications within Enterprise environments, you want them to install automatically, hence you need a software package.

Many companies seem to create their Adobe Flash and Shockwave installation packages by capturing the installation sources that are used when initiating an end user installation from the Adobe website as shown in the picture below.

The challenge of this method is that you need to capture the sources while the web based installer is running (these are stored temporarily on the system) and that you probably want to get rid of any additional software that is being installed such as the Google Toolbar in this case.

Many people seem not to be aware that Adobe does provide redistributable media for enterprise deployment of their Adobe Flash and Adobe Shockwave players. On the download pages of the appropriate Player, you will see a link called “Distribute Flash Player” or “Distribute Shockwave Player”

By clicking on one of these links you are being redirected to the Adobe Player Licensing website where you find the links to apply for a license and obtain the installation media to distribute the players within your enterprise.

License Flash Player ›
License Shockwave Player ›

You will have to provide some information like Company name, number of seats and the operating system used. Once you have submitted your request, it takes about 5-10 minutes until you will receive an e-mail with the links to download the players.

Well, that is what I consider as taking the easy route, clicking on a link, filling in a form, and after let’s say 15 minutes you get the install_flash_player_10_plugin.msi for Flash and sw_lic_full_installer.msi for Shockwave and you’re ready to go.

A similar method is available for Adobe Reader. I plan to post an article about that soon.

Being one of the lucky ones who was able to sign-up to the Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview program, I have started looking at the deployment of Microsoft Office 2010 today.

My first observation was that unfortunately the provided documentation seems to be ahead of the Office Installation sources that have been made available for download. I noticed this when making an attempt to run the setup.exe /admin command which would normally launch the Office Customization Wizard, but it wouldn’t because the necessary components that are usually located within the Admin folder aren’t available yet, in fact the whole Admin folder as such seems to be missing. OK, so no advanced customizations for now, back to basic.

The current Office 2010 beta that is made available for download is packaged into an executable called “O2010_SingleImage_retail_ship_x86_en-us.exe”. (32 bit version). To create the administrative installation point, extract the content using the following command:

O2010_SingleImage_retail_ship_x86_en-us.exe /extract:c:\office2010

You should then see the following content within the C:\Office2010 folder.

As a next step, open the config.xml file located within the folder SingleImage.WW and modify the file as shown below. (replace the product key with the one you received).

And finally create a batch file that runs the following command:

setup.exe /config SingleImage.WW\config.xml

Office 2010 Beta will now be installed in silent mode. this might be helpful when planning an automated deployment for testing purposes.

More about Office 2010:

Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering blog

Backstage with Office 2010

Office 2010 – The Movie (I recommend watching this one)

Office 2010 for IT Pros

A Look At Office 2010 with Chris Capossela

Windows7 comes with Windows Installer 5.0 that has a new installation property called MSIFASTINSTALL. Using the MSIFASTINSTALL property can help reduce time required to install a windows installer package.

The trick behind MSIFASTINSTALL is quite simple, it just skips things that consume time like creating a system restore point or calculating the space requirements (File Costing). So if you do not need system restore points and know that your clients have enough disk space anyway, you could consider using the MSIFASTINSTALL property to speed up application installations.

The table below shows the results of the tests I have performed on Windows7 Enterprise build 7201 with 2 rather small packages.

I used the following commands:

msiexec /I Firefox-3.5-en-US.msi MSIFASTINSTALL=1 /l*v C:\MSTTEST\Install.log /qb

msiexec /I skypesetup.msi MSIFASTINSTALL=1 /l*v C:\MSTTEST\Install.log /qb

Note that I had enabled logging to track the installation duration. 

More information about the MSIFASTINSTALL property can be found here. You might also want to take a look at the FASTOEM property.

Microsoft has released ACT 5.5 (Application Compatibility Toolkit). ACT 5.5 provides support for pre-RTM version of Windows7.

To learn more about ACT 5.5 I recommend reading  “Windows 7 Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5: Interview with Jeremy Chapman”.

ACT 5.5. can be downloaded here

Another great information source is the Application Compatibility and User Account Control site on Microsoft TechNet.

And finally I came across the blog from Chris Jackson -the App Compat Guy” that is worth a visit as well.

I’ve just spend an hour in gathering some additional information around Windows 7 Application Compatibility. Till now when we moved to a new operating system version a significant amount of effort was required with regard to application compatibility. So will companies that invested in Windows Vista Application compatibility have to do all that work again for Windows 7 ?

Unfortunately not, on almost any Microsoft source i found around Application Compatibility, the following statements are being made:

“The key is, if you are ready for Vista, you will be ready for Windows 7”

“if your application can run in Vista, it can run in Windows 7”

An updated version of the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) for Windows 7 will be released in the coming months, but according to a comment of one of the Springboard Series participants, it would only have one additional check related to Windows 7.

Those who took a look at the Windows 7 internal version number might have noticed that this is 6.1. This is important for application compatibility as well, since many applications would check for the major operating system version number (as seen when moving from Windows XP version 5.1 to Windows Vista version 6.0.

So the conclusion is that those companies who want to accelerate their desktop migration from Windows XP to Windows 7, could actually start testing their applications against Windows Vista and / or the Windows 7 Beta version.

Additional Resources:

Be ready for Windows 7: Application Compatibility Jay Paloma, Deployment Technical Specialist from the Microsoft Singapore Office explaining Windows 7 application compatibility.

Windows 7 Application Quality Cookbook

Springboard Series

Application Compatibility and User Account Control

Usually when you read a Microsoft Knowledge Base article you find a detailed description on how to solve a particular problem.

In some KB articles you will find the following picture

This indicates that the “Fix it Team” has provided a script / package to automate the system modifications required to fix the problem or change the system behavior.

The fix it team has their own “fix it for me blog” where they list the KB articles they have provided a fix it package.

This is primarily useful for users that aren’t familiar with manually changing the system registry etc, but can also be of use for system administrations.

Yesterday Microsoft released the Release Candidate for Internet Explorer 8 that of course contains a lot of new features that I am not going to rewrite here again, as others did so already.

Reading the IE8 product group blog 100 additional group policy settings are being introduced to extend manageability of IE8 through Group Policy Management. The updated Group Policy Reference including the new IE8 settings can be downloaded here and updated Group Policy Settings ADM files can be found here. Also worth reading is the IE8 Deployment Guide.

And finally for those that want to prevent IE8 being installed in an uncontrolled way throughout their infrastructure can consider using the IE8 blocker toolkit. The IE8 blocker toolkit provides 2 methods to prevent IE8 being automatically installed on your client devices. Method 1 consists of a batch file and Method 2 is a group policy adm template  that allows you to configure IE8 installation blocking through GPO.

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For all those of you who want to get an overview on today’s Application Virtualization solutions and technologies, i recommend reading "Application Virtualization Solutions Overview and Feature Compare Matrix" published by Ruben Spruijt and Jurjen van Leeuwen.

For those dealing with application packaging here’s an interesting tool you should know about. For more details check out the InstEd site and read theblog.

On www.AppDeploy.com you find an excellent document describing all Installshield setup parameters, very helpfull if you want to install applications in silent mode.
http://www.appdeploy.com/articles/InstallShield%20Setup%20Parameters.pdf