Software Deployment

I hope, you have already done with the homework using MS Application compatibility toolkit - before starting with creating packages.

Oh yes, you bet. ACT has been useful for well known apps. We have many that in house and exotic apps that have no community info. There are also cases where the manufacturer has been changed from the real name to our company name at the packaging stage X years ago .... unfortunately ... and ACT can't help there.

Hello, I would be happy to offer some guidance here. I have been working in the field of application compatibility and application packaging for the past 10 years and have worked on countless migrations very similar to yours. I work for a company called ChangeBASE, who have a product called AOK. We have found that migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7 is very different ball game from migrations to XP. The key compatibility issues that we are seeing pertain to APIs, components, file types and underlying functions that have been deprecated between XP and Windows 7. These are things like GINA (Graphical Identification and Authentication) for VPN client apps, Session 0 for older services based apps and Control Panel Applet files. In the olden days we would have had to write some scripts to search for these issues, but thankfully nowadays we have tools to both find and resolve most of the issues for us automatically.

AOK will help you test your applications for Windows 7, 64-bit, Windows Server 2008 as well as App-V, Citrix XenApp, VMWare ThinApp and SWV. We would be happy to run a number of applications through the tool for you and share the results with you as well as this forum if you would be agreeable, as I am sure this would be of interest to others. We can also help automate application packaging best practice and company standards, so that you can ensure that all of your applications are of a consistent high quality both during the migration as well as in BAU. I hope this helps.

Hi Sophie, yes we looked very closely at AOK and were impressed with the features but in the end we took another comparable product and that is working quite well so far.

We are writing best practices now.

Thanks for your response. Do let us know if there is anything we can help with - we have new Batch EXE to MSI features and also batch virtualisation features coming out soon, so there is some very exciting technology on the cards - do stay in touch - we would always be keen to have your feedback.