ZENworks Application Virtualization is a great application virtualization solution. But anyone who e.g. has read “Application Virtualization Smackdown: Head-to-head analysis of Citrix, Endeavors, InstallFree, Microsoft, Spoon, Symantec and VMware” knows more solutions are available. ZENworks has an agnostic approach to Windows Application deployment, so can also choose another Application Virtualization solution.
Besides the already built-in ‘ZAV Import Wizard’ customers, Novell and its partners asked for ThinApp and Microsoft App-V support as well. This why we’ve added a new ‘Import Wizard’ for App-V applications in the current ‘Professional Edition’ of Bundle Commander. The ‘ThinApp Import Wizard’ is currently under development.
If you prefer to use ‘Microsoft App-V’ as your application virtualization solution, but like to manage it all through ‘ZENworks Configuration Management’, you need to do at least two things (provided you already have a current App-V Server Infrastructure that is):
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- Deploy the ‘Microsoft Application Virtualization Desktop Client 4.6‘
- Create Launch Bundles for every App-V application you want to provide on an end users desktop
That’s where the ‘App-V Import Wizard’ comes in.
The ‘App-V Import Wizard’ is able to connect to the ‘Application Virtualization Database’ on the database server you’ve configured during installation of your App-V server:
All App-V applications which are available in the ‘Application Virtualization Database’ will be shown.You can then select for which applications you want to create launch Bundles for:
The ‘Import App-V Application’ screen then shows the suggested ‘Bundle Name’ and ‘Bundle Description’ for every selected ‘App-V’ application. The information is extracted from the App-V OSD file, the App-V icon will be used as an icon for the Windows Bundle. When you want to change the Name and/or Description, you can click each cell and make changes accordingly. After checking the ‘Import’ checkbox for every bundle you want to create, click ‘Import’ and the Launch Bundles will be created:
The ‘Launch Bundles’ which have been created, have one ‘Launch’ action each. The name of every Launch Action is derived from the selected App-V application:
The ‘Action Details’ show how the correct parameters for ‘sfttray.exe’ are being configured:
