Do you know that there are 59 ways to publish an application in your enterprise infrastructure?
I bet you don’t. Most people count only four: a MSI based installations or an application virtualization package, installed/streamed to a workstation or a Server Based Computing server.
But there are more, and there is a huge possibility you need all 59 different ways, or at least a great deal of them in your enterprise IT infrastructure. Most enterprise IT departments have a vision or strategy how their infrastructure should be developed. ‘We do only VDI, we only use Server Based Computing or we have a mix of XenApp and traditional Windows 7 workstations’ are often heard from my customers.
In theory this is ok, but in practice this can never be delivered, especially in large enterprise environments with 500+ applications. With so many applications there will always be exceptions. The IT department can simply reject the application, but if the application is mission-critical you have no other choice than to support it. And when you are in the middle of a migration project, you need to implement an extra infrastructure component to support this single application.
32/64bit, Internet Explorer compatibility, SBC/VDI, persistent or non-persistent desktops, application virtualization, traditional workstations, all choices the IT department must make. From a technology point of view, the IT department can support all application publishing techniques.
The question remains if you want all those techniques. Sometimes it is better to find other alternatives. In some cases it is cheaper to deploy a new application rather than deploying a whole new infrastructure to support a legacy application. Most important is to prevent these choices should be made. Microsoft just released Internet Explorer 11. Take actions so applications support this version. Ditch the 16bit applications. Ask application vendors when the 64bit version is ready.
Please act now so you don’t have to suffer the consequences tomorrow.