In considering this as a possible solution (or at least one worth demoing) I consulted a colleague and the immediate suggestion was also VMware ThinApp. The alternative I found was VMWare ThinApp. My goal here is to make the application available to mostly XP users, however Windows 7 is being deployed a machine or two at a time, and there are a few cases where I can see that these users might also need to access this old application. I have not completely given up on the idea of packaging the application for deployment, but the issues that popped up there made me think about other ways to make this application easily available. The biggest issue there was the settings within the application being pulled into the MSI correctly to ensure it would operate as needed. This was a great idea, until the application had other ideas. Thinking about this problem, which I had previously tackled with Citrix Metaframe XP, got me to consider packaging the application into an MSI and pushing it out to the users with Group Policy. The problem isn’t that the application doesn’t run (yet) - it is that there isn’t a good way to quickly make it available.

Simple enough, I thought, since most of the PCs in the environment are still running Windows XP and the application does run well. Recently I was tasked with improving availability of a legacy application used by a few people in my organization. Getting a bit more life out of legacy applications with VMWare ThinAppĭerek Schauland shares his experience with VMware's ThinApp solution, which he is using to help make a legacy application available to some users.

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