If you are working with VMware ThinApp, the most important thing is to understand the Isolation Modes with which the virtualized application can be configured. Peter Björk a VMware ThinApp expert from Sweden explains in a video how it works. Brilliant Peter!
 

Deploying the SAPGUI can be very time consuming in a large enterprise environment. It can even be worse if you’re using physical desktops, virtual desktops and terminal services because you may need to deploy it to different operating systems, what means that you have to package it several times. To make your live easier you could use VMware ThinApp and virtualize the application to get a single EXE file which can run isolated from the operating system and other applications for conflict-free execution on the different endpoint devices. After several month of QA testing SAP has now official support for packaging the SAPGUI with ThinApp. This support is documented in the SAP support note 66971.

You can get official support if you’re using the SAP GUI for Windows from version 7.20 patchlevel 5 and VMware ThinApp 4.6 or higher.

Here is some information from the note:

For the SAP GUI to work with Thinapp and Office 2003 you need to

change:

Search for “VirtualizeExternalOutOfProcessCOM=0 ” and uncomment it

by removing the “;” at the beginning of the entry.

o For the SAP GUI to work with Thinapp and Office 2007 (2010) you

need to change three parameters in the “package.ini” file found in

the project folder

a) Search for the saplogon.exe entry and add an additional line with

“ForcedVirtualLoadPaths=%ProgramFilesDir%\Microsoft

Office\Office12\PPCORE.DLL”

For Office 2010 the entry looks like this:

“ForcedVirtualLoadPaths=%ProgramFilesDir%\Microsoft

Office\Office14\PPCORE.DLL”

b) Search for the saplgpad.exe entry and add an additional line with

“ForcedVirtualLoadPaths=%ProgramFilesDir%\Microsoft

Office\Office12\PPCORE.DLL”

For Office 2010 the entry looks like this:

“ForcedVirtualLoadPaths=%ProgramFilesDir%\Microsoft

Office\Office14\PPCORE.DLL”

c) Search for “VirtualizeExternalOutOfProcessCOM=0 ” and uncomment it

by removing the “;” at the beginning of the entry.

Rebuild the package with “build.bat”

The usage of SAP GUI for Windows in conjunction with other virtualization

products like Microsoft App-V (Softgrid) is currently not supported.

If you need more information about virtualizing the SAP GUI with ThinApp please check the support note 66971.

Via: VMware blogs (Virtualization for SAP solutions)

Peter Rudolf from Mightycare has released a new tool Explorer tool for compiled ThinApp packages. with that tool you can look into the ThinApp packages, register them or install and uninstall the packages on your computer. The first version has the following features.

* Information about a package
* Register / Unregister ThinApp Packages
* Install / Uninstall ThinApp Packages
* Shortcut list
* View virtual Registry entry
* View virtual Filesystem
* View options (package.ini) for the ThinApp package
* Retrieve icon

Link: Mightycare

I just saw an interesting Tweet from Peter Björk, one of the VMware ThinApp gurus on Twitter which might be also valuable to you. It’s about running a Windows XP only app on Windows 7.

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VMware just released a new version of ThinApp full of great features. My favourite is the new ThinApp Converter 1.0 but read the full article to learn more.

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Web applications should be platform independent because their are standards like HTML which can be interpreted by any browser out there. They should, but many web applications are not true web applications. They use components like ActiveX or special plug-ins for the browser. Siebel is one good example for that. Loads of companies invested in web applications in the last few years and many of them are tight connected to a dedicated browser. But what if a browser goes EOL, like we see with Internet Explorer 6 today? Internet Explorer 6 can’t be installed natively on Windows 7, but many web applications still depends on it. For a company that means that they can’t move to new client operating systems, have to redesign the applications or find another way to run the legacy web application. On the VMware ThinApp blog there was an article published two days ago, which brings some videos showing how IE6 can run on Windows 7 with a Tech Preview of Thinapp.

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Back in my Desktop Specialist days I’ve created several beginner videos which explain the different functions in ThinApp. For example they are about AppLink, Entry Points, ThinReg, sbmerge and also about the isolation modes and the virtual file system. Unfortunately they are only available in the German language but if someone speaks it, please enjoy. You’ll find the videos in my Vimeo ThinApp group at: http://www.vimeo.com/groups/thinapp

My colleague Raymond van’t Hag wrote an article about the ThinApp basics on his blog bright-streams.com. If you haven’t worked with ThinApp yet, you should definitely check his article. By the way bright-streams.com is Raymond’s blog, dedicated to VMware View & ThinApp.

Yesterday, VMware released ThinApp 4.5 which adds support for new operating systems and additional features. The What’s New document can give you an insight.

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Over at the ThinApp blog there was a new article publishes which describes how to map a network drive within a ThinApp packaged application.

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