http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/TollyGroup-ThinApp-Test-Report-Aug09.pdf

What do you guys think?

Seems logical and the outcome correlates to what I have been finding in the field. I would assume this is something that can be distributed to a wider audience?

Ray

The paper is freely available for download on the VMware site

No Symantec SWV involved?
Hmm

I guess the thing I don't care for about it is any company can hire Tolly to do these things but specify only key points and situations where they know they will do better.

For example Thinapp needs a 3rd party to deliver the packages to the PC and fairly complicated (to me) scripting to do file associations and short cuts. I think this is why MS and Citrix use an installed agent.

I'm not saying this would be a show stopper, but to me it seems a little misleading to companies who come across this while researching App Virt solutions. They put the agents in a negative light but don't give the advantage of the agent over Thinapp.

Is my reasoning flawed in this?

You pay for what you get with Tolly it is certainly not a true third party review. I would also throw Xenocode into the mix , great product really good execution and I hear lots of good things about it from customers that are using it today .No Symantec shame on the testers!

Chris,
Just to be clear, ThinApp has multiple enterprise delivery options. The easiest is to create a standard MSI with the package and leverage any ESD solution to deploy. the second is a registration utility that comes with the product. You do not need to have any complicated scripting to use it. Usually one or two lines for a login script and that's it. You can even download a sample login script from http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/

Ray

that last post was not intended to be anonymous, I just clicked the wrong button...lol

Ray

that last post was not intended to be anonymous, I just clicked the wrong button...lol

Ray

Certainly this isn't an independent report, but a paid for one. The selection of just about everything in it seems subjective and easily turned around. In the case of the App-V information the authors either did not know enough about the product of chose to ignore a lot. Certainly several points are described under the worst possible light for App-V (example: the need for three installers including specifying some APPGUID versus the single install using the setup.exe that takes care of any missing prerequisites).

But if you want a document to make a point for ThinApp, this is your report.

Tim,

Absolutely agree. I supported SoftGrid for years and now support ThinApp. My focus has always been directed towards what problem the customer needs to solve and then you pick the tool or tools to fix it. lately the customers I have been interacting with all seem to come to the conclusions of the report.

So in that respect I think the report is valuable, but I agree that some of the points were a little nit picky about the competitors components.

Ray

What i would like to see is take management from App-V, exe-format ThinApp and integration from SWV.

Sounds like your talking about InstallFree.

In our experience the answer for the best solution is always different.

When we do a complete end to end benchmark / test with the customers own applications and hardware and repeat the exact same test on other brokers we find that the answer are not always the same. In some cases VMware wins, in others it's Microsfoft and Citrix.

There are no ultimate solutions here and all are different and really comes down to the application mix and hardware being used by that customer.

We launched an out of the box benchmark tool at VMworld just for this very reason so customers and/or integrators can use to validate the best solutions.

For basic apps I am sure that Thinapp could do the job the easiest. But, for any type of large enterprise deployment I would much rather have App-V or XenApp. Thinapp just would not be able to hold up in my experience.

We've been using ThinApp for our VDI for the last 6 months or so. That's all changing. More due to the fact that we went with XenDesktop rather than View, than anything else. We already have licensing for App-V, the additional cost of ThinApp wasn't in the budget.

Etz

speaking about enterprise deployment tools and ThinApp. Customers who use BMC Marimba can deploy ThinApp .exe packages to user desktops using the process as they use for standard MSI applications