Recently, while performing a POC for a Charlotte based law firm, we ran into a case where the client was suffering from the inability to upgrade their Citrix XenApp infrastructure to a Windows 2008 64-bit platform. The issue centered around an older version of a popular legal oriented software package called Elite which is developed by Thomson Elite.

The packaging of this application was by no definition a difficult one. .Net and a few other dependencies were installed and within 30 minutes we were able to successfully run this legacy version of the application on Windows 2008, Windows 7 and 64bit machines. Along with Elite 3.6, we also ThinApp'd IE 7 to provide access to the Elite Web Component which was incompatible with newer version of Internet Explorer.

The IE package was left clean as the client obtains MSIs directly from vendors such as Adobe, Java, and Apple and deploys them via their AD infrastructure. This allowed them to leverage their existing application deployment methods and deliver those plugins to multiple browser versions including the ThinApp'd Internet Explorer 7.

This was a "quick win" for the customer and immediately demonstrated the raw efficiencies that can be obtained by virtualizing your applications with ThinApp from VMware. This solved a major hurdle to upgrading their underlying infrastructure while also gaining efficiencies in application deployment and the user experience.

On to the next ThinApp!