Today VMware announced the availability of ThinApp 4.7. The new version is Horizon AppManager enabled what means that you can use the packages with VMware’s cloud-based deployment and management platform. VMware published a great article ybou the integration of ThinApp in Horizon AppManager at the ThinApp Blog. Follow this link: http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2011/11/vmware-thinapp-47-whats-new.html

What elese is new in ThinApp?

There are a few resolved issues in the version 4.7:

• An error message is displayed in the console when you use non-ASCII characters in application installer subdirectory names. However, the package is built successfully.
• After appsyncing Firefox 3.0 or Firefox 3.6.3, the Mozilla Firefox.ex$ file remains in the application folder on Windows XP 64 bit machines.
• ThinApp Packages are not built if Build.bat is launched from a directory other that its current directory.
• An error is displayed if you insert a Word object into Powerpoint 2007 on Vista and Windows 7 SP1.
• Quicktime throws a shell32.dll error and crashes on a Windows XP SP3 32-bit machine.
• A second session of virtual IE6 crashes when you use a virtual Java plug-in.
• Capture of IE8 and Silverlight crashes IE8 when you access Silverlight content.
• Thinapped Firefox and Java cause Web browsers to freeze on launch and require a restart of Java to proceed.

You can find the release notes here: http://www.vmware.com/support/thinapp4/doc/releasenotes_thinapp47.html

VMware published a new 32 minutes video about manageing ThinApp with Horizon AppManager on Youtube.

Vittorio Viarengo gives you a great vision of VMware’s End User Computing strategy.

VMware just released the new version of ThinApp. In version 4.6.2 you’ll find the following features.

• Multiple enhancements have been made in the ThinDirect component, and outstanding known issues addressed, to improve performance and reliability.

• ThinDirect now supports the redirection of all browser pages except a specified list of URLs, instead of only supporting the redirection of only a list of specified URLs.

• New parameters have been added to the thinreg utility to enhance search and exclude functionality.

• The THINREG utility can now uninstall applications without dependence on .vbs file association to run the uninstall script.

• Microsoft Office 2007 application startup times have been improved by approximately 30%.

• The IgnoreDDEMessages parameter has been added to the Package.ini file. This parameter, which is automatically set for virtualized Internet Explorer 6 packages, causes an application to ignore any DDE messages that it receives, meaning that it can be used to ensure Document Open operations always launch in the native application and not an open virtual application.

Click this link for a complete overview of all fixes.

Login to the VMware website and download the new version now.

I’m wondering how long this will last on the RingCube/Citrix website.

Link: http://www.ringcube.com/VMware.html

As I don’t know if all German readers here know my German language That’s my View version I’d like to give you a quick hint for an event. It’s the 1st German ThinApp Community Meeting which will take place on 13th September in the Cologne Area. If you’re interested please take a look at this article. The ThinApp Community is a non-VMware event, ran by a VMware ThinApp customer. so it’s NOT a sales or marketing event, it’s pure technics! If you want to join it, please follow the registration information on the other blog post.

The VRC Team (Ruben Spruijt, Sven Huisman and Jeroen van der Kamp) have just released their new VRC Phase IV whitepaper which is about the impact of application virtualization on VDI. A very interesting read, especially when you’re interested in the performance differences between the several application virtualization solutions.

Here a statement from the article:

Depending on the use case scenario, Project VRC discovered that this impact can be significant. Test results show that Application Virtualization has impact on the VDI user density, which can be decreased by 20% to 45% when Office 2007 is completely virtualized. This should be considered as a worst case scenario. When only a couple of specific (business) applications is virtualized, the session density decreases by only 3 to 12%. In practice the Application Virtualization overhead will be highly dependent on how often virtualized applications are started, and how much file IO and registry access they generate: specifically the creation of the virtualization ‘bubble’/environment for the application can have a significant overhead.

Link: BrianMadden.com

If you want to know how you get your Thinapp packages start even quicker, you should check out the new blog post of Peter Björk, who’s the ThinApp expert in EMEA. He describes which steps to take to optimize the virtual applications.

Link: ThinApp Blog

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)