This morning at Teched Europe they announced the beta availability of two Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack products that will support the Windows 8.1 preview, User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) 2.0 and Application Virtualization (App-V) 5.0 SP2.
For those of your who are using App-V 4.6 we are also making available today a public beta of App-V 4.6 SP3 which will also support Windows 8.1
More details on Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) 5.0 SP2 features and improvements below :
UE-V is not the only critical component of our virtualization story, we would now like to discuss a second component, Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V). App-V enables anywhere access to virtualized applications on any authorized PC without application installs. Microsoft’s has a long history of providing flexible application virtualization with powerful management, and making the virtual application behave as if it was locally installed. App-V 5.0 SP2 builds on these solutions through the following new features:
- Shell extension support, enriching the user experience.
- Sequencing enhancements, simplifying the virtual application creation process.
Let’s now go into some more detail on these new features in App-V.
Shell extension support
By building on App-V 5.0 investments which delivered you the ability to virtualize highly integrated applications, App-V 5.0 SP2 is providing support for a frequently requested extension point into the operating system, shell extensions. For example if you virtualize a compression program or a backup program that integrated with the Windows shell, you will now see the contextual options that these apps have like send to zip or backup to archive. Essentially this enables the virtual application to behave more like if it was installed locally on your device.
Sequencing enhancements
Powerful and flexible management is a key component of Microsoft’s application virtualization solution, allowing IT to deploy, track and service virtual applications. Continuing the approach, we have made improvements to the sequencer enabling it to automatically detect with the option to include, run time dependencies like MSXML and Visual C++ libraries in the App-V package during the sequencing process. Other additions in App-V 5.0 SP2 beta include general user experience improvements during the application publishing and refresh process, including a new publishing progress bar, to improve the overall experience of deploying a set of applications to a user.
Read the full story here : http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/springboard/archive/2013/06/26/ue-v-app-v-betas-for-windows-8-1-now-available.aspx
Hope it Helps ,
Kenny Buntinx