This year at Briforum Chicago 2013 Nicke Kallen and myself were selected to deliver a presentation titled Application Packaging Smackdown. What we attempted to do is bring some sort of clarity as to the tooling options that are available to packagers since much has changed recently. These changes include features such as application compatibility analysis, automated application repackaging and support for virtual application packaging.

This presentation has been an interesting journey for both of us as we have discovered some surprises along the way as we took a close look at what is currently available for application packaging. One notable surprise was the inclusion of MSI Studio with ChangeBASE. The significance of this discovery has us wondering if this is the new competition to AdminStudio since there isn't much that supports Windows Installer editing, application compatibility, automated repackaging, and virtual application support into one suite.

We also take a look at more niche tools that could be used to complement other tools and make them more comparable to a suite. Unfortunately I am not going to go into deep detail at this time as we are wrapping up a whitepaper to better describe our findings. What we are doing as a bit of a teaser is to publish the slide deck used at Briforum. We've decided to release this deck on Nicke's blog which you can find over here:

http://www.applepie.se/briforum-2013-application-packaging-smackdown

Please let us know what you think, we are always open to suggestion and having our own views challenged. Here is our email alias you can use to provide feedback applicationpackagingsmackdown@bighatgroup.com.