One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind..
VMware now have a tool that will finally correct Office licensing issues when virtual Office is deployed to some systems that have Office installed natively. Read all about it in the KB-article: Resolving licensing errors when deploying virtual Office to a system with Office installed natively, (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2107369).
By Aaron Black, ThinApp Product Manager, End-User Computing, VMware
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.
There is quite a few blog posts and KB articles describing how to virtualize Microsoft Office 2010 with the help of ThinApp.
KB articles:
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2021901
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1022287
A blog post:
http://thinappguru.blogspot.se/2012/03/notes-on-packaging-office-project-and.html
If you have Office locally installed but need to virtualize Project or Visio (many steps are the same as for Office 2010):
http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2013/02/thinapp-microsoft-visio-and-project-2010-while-locally-installed-microsoft-office-2010.html
Additional information for German Windows XP:
If you follow the procedures described in above posts your package should work very well on an English OS. Jonathan Wilk (@DooDleWilk), Escalation Engineer at VMware Global Support Services, just sent me his notes working on a case. The package worked just fine on English Operating Systems and German Windows 7 (32 and 64-bit) but failed on a German Windows XP.
After some troubleshooting he realized that on an English Windows XP the OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform folder is located in the “Documents and Settings” folder. On a German Windows XP the folder is called “Dokumente und Einstellungen”. So the workaround was simply to create the “Dokumente und Einstellungen” folder underneath the %Drive_C% folder macro and copy the content from your “Documents and Settings” folder. Rebuild and it works.
I wouldn’t be surprised if other applications will have the same issue and therefore would need the same fix in order to be portable.
While many are virtualizing Microsoft Office 2010 during a Proof Of Concept (POC) most companies decide to install Microsoft Office natively rather than virtualizing it. Both packaging method are valid but many times it’s easier and more efficient to have Office locally installed. That said, virtualizing Microsoft Visio and Project is a whole different ballgame. Virtualizing Visio/Project makes very much sense in many designs. There are quite a few KB articles and blog posts out there covering Office 2010 and it’s components. But so far I’ve yet to see a complete list of what is needed in order to build a Visio/Project package and have it coexist and to a certain degree integrate with native Office. So I started to collect all data I found on Internet. I ended up adding a couple thinks myself as well.
Here are the procedures for how to get a ThinApp packaged application such as Visio 2007 to work with a natively installed Outlook:
Best practices packaging with ThinApp includes verifying nothing is being left running, locking the Sandbox, when the end-user shuts down the application. A simple method to verify nothing is running in the background is to try to delete the package’s Sandbox. If it is locked and you cannot delete it, something is still running.
To find out what it is I always use Sysinternals Process Explorer. This video will show you how to use Process Monitor to find out what is keeping the Sandbox opened.
How to solve the issue depends on what process we’re talking about. It can for example be an auto update process that needs to be disabled or as in this example the all to common ctfmon.exe. To solve ctfmon.exe (advanced text services) simply disable it within the virtual environment by adding below to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER.txt file.
isolation_writecopy HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\CTF
Value=Disable Thread Input Manager
REG_DWORD=#01#00#00#00
Problem viewing the Video? Try this link: http://vimeo.com/channels/thinapp#22228464
Below are instructions provided by a ThinApp Customer on how to ThinApp Reflection Multi-Host 8.0 Standard with a Native Office 2007 Install.
These are instructions on how to install, configure, and capture Microsoft Office XP as a ThinApp Package. These instructions can be used to configure and deploy any version of Microsoft Office XP.
These are instructions on how to Create a ThinApp package of Open Office or Star Office.