Today I was playing with VMware’s ThinApp, which is a program they have in beta right now that virtualizes applications so they can run side by side where conflicts would otherwise be present. There are several solutions out that that can do this but from my experience non of them were able to get IE 8 Beta 1 installed. VMware’s ThinApp came through and I was able to successfully get IE 8 Beta 1 installed in a single, portable application to run right next to IE 7 or any other browser.
It was very easy to do, too. They recommend that you have a clean system to get this applications working. So I started with a clean virtual machine of Windows XP SP2 and simply ran the Setup Capture program for ThinApp. From there you just follow the directions and install IE 8, even rebooting after the install caused no problems; the Setup Capture program came right back up and continued on. When all was said and done, I copied the final package to my XP SP3 desktop that has IE7 installed and double clicked the executable. I instantly had IE 8 running right next to IE 7.
I was very impressed with how easy it really was. I highly recommend you check this beta out if you can! It could be very useful for a lot of purposes in a business environment.
Update: I got the beta on Thursday, then played around with it and finally wrote about it on Friday. As someone pointed out to me… it happened to be released on that Friday… so when I wrote the article is was actually out already. Sorry about that. The review still holds… definitely check out the evaluation.
I have to say that I am quite impressed with ThinApp’s ability to completely package all of an application’s prerequisites into a single executable or msi file.
As I have said, if VMware could add some type of a management interface, like Microsoft SoftGrid has, this would be a total, all-in-one solution. I just think that it would be nice to be able to centrally manage your applications and provide easy upgrades to end users.
You have to remember that ThinApp isn’t trying to be a deployment service… it simply packages up applications… very well if I might add. It even gives you the ability to run the thinstalled app with switches. It will pass the switches onto the program it is executing.
For example…with the VMware VI client 2.5… you could pass “-passthroughAuth” to have it automatically log you in to your VI.