Office 2007 And AppVirt

Best Practice Alert – did you folks in the app-virtusphere know that Office 2k7 was not initially designed for virtualization?

I’m a bit bemused by the SoftGrid Blog team using that phrase “not designed.” I just wonder, with my tin-hat on, waiting for the black helicopters – did MS do this with intention? Will Biff go into rehab?

From the SG Blog – (link) Microsoft Office Support of SoftGrid Outlined

“Keep in mind that Office 2007 was not designed for virtualization, so there are some features that will not work in a virtualized environment. Find out more about best practices and limitations at www.windowsvista.com/optimizeddesktop.”

With intention? I don’t think so – along the sequencing path there have been a few add-ons to achieve packaging nirvana as well as updates to the AppVirt client. For instance to the AppVirt sequencer base image – we’ve added Windows Installer, .Net and VC++ redistributables as needed. Hey, even the AppVirt sequencer needs a nip and a tuck every once in a while – don’t hate it becuase its beautiful!

Reading on –

“Depending on the usage scenario, we recommend that customers install Office 2007 on their client machines to ensure access to all of the product features, and use virtualization for older versions of Office in cases where they need to run multiple versions of office at the same time. “

Best Practice-

This last quote is the “one ring” to rule them all that falls into “best practice.” We have found in our AppVirt deployments that its beneficial for long term support – from within your own enterprise and from Microsoft to follow best practice and install Office locally and sequence other versions for AppVirt delivery. We learned this lesson back in the version 2.x days on a two thousand plus seat deployment. While Office sequenced and streamed it was trial and error to find all the touch-points where other applications needed Office connectivity. It became very clear we needed to install locally and sequence and stream older versions.

Biff did go into rehab – my helicoptor awaits.