On behalf of VMware, I’d like to introduce the product of a substantial engineering effort to optimize the architecture and capabilities of our market-leading application virtualization offering–ThinApp 5.0. We took the opportunity earlier this month to make some announcements during the VMworld event in Europe. In this blog, I’m just going to offer a quick review of the offering and invite you to download and see for yourself the new capabilities in this release.
For our existing customers, this is a friendly reminder that this is a major release, so you will need to fulfill your subscription and receive new license keys along with the download of the bits at My VMware. With this platform release, we’ve updated the product life cycle and extended the support for ThinApp 5.0 to a total of 5 years. Not only do we include ThinApp in all VMware Horizon bundles and the Horizon Suite, but also we are continuing to offer ThinApp as a standalone product.
ThinApp 5.0 is now available at the VMware ThinApp download site.
What’s New with ThinApp 5.0?
- Support for 64-bit applications and for an additional operating system: Windows 8.1! You’ve been asking…and we are now delivering the ability to virtualize 64-bit applications using the same friendly packaging mechanism and capabilities that you already use in our previous releases. No learning curve necessary!
- Optimized architecture which preserves our agentless approach but leverages in-line hooking using NTDLL.DLL for improved application compatibility and performance–utilizing this layer helps us virtualize both modern and legacy applications more efficiently. See the Horizon Flux blog for more details on these changes.
- Support for integration of AppSense personalization settings between native and ThinApp versions of applications. See the AppSense announcement for more information.
- Run virtualized Internet Explorer 10 (32- or 64-bit) NOW! Keep in mind that you can either deploy IE 10 as a virtualized package or simply leverage virtualized plug-ins like JREs within the native IE 10 browser. Internet Explorer can be used on Windows 7 and 8 but will not be supported on Windows 8.1 at this time.
- To help manage those virtualized browsers and clunky web apps, use our patented ThinDirect technology with improved ADM and ADMX files, available in the ThinApp installation directory, for URL-based management of native and virtualized browsers.
- Virtualized Office 2013 anyone? You bet–we can do that: deploy virtualized Office 2013 to Windows 7 environments as a gradual migration plan or as a standardized installation. We are now offering packaging guides that have been verified by our own engineers and support group:
