Windows 7 App Compatibility and Portability: Fact or Fiction?
If you were reading our web site lately (or even talked to any of us here at InstallFree), you probably noticed that we really like to talk about how InstallFree can help solve application compatibility issues when migrating to Windows 7. You might also have noticed that unlike other vendors in the app virtualization space, we don't really "hedge" or "qualify" our statements.
Where other vendors say that you can package applications on Windows XP and they will *probably* run on Windows 7 (subject to a rather long list of exceptions and conditions that you can see here and here), InstallFree just says that the applications you package on XP will run on Windows 7. Period.
Why is that we don't hedge, qualify or footnote these kinds of statements?
The answer is actually quite simple: we don't need to. If your InstallFree Virtual Apps run on Windows XP, they will run on Windows 7***
The reason other application virtualization technologies have a problem with portability is that their virtual applications are not completely isolated from the underlying OS. Or, to put it in other words, they are not really virtualized. They still use and rely on certain OS or other natively-installed components in order to function, and when those components are no longer available, the apps stop working. When you think about it, the way these other products package their applications tells the whole story: you need to install the application on a clean machine and capture the delta. Whatever was already present on this clean machine becomes a dependency that is really not 100% transferrable to a new OS.
With InstallFree, we create virtual applications that are completely isolated from the host OS. Our Encapsulator creates a virtualized environment into which you "install" the application and we don't use "delta" or "before and after" scans to identify application resources. This way, there are really no hidden dependencies and we can make applications fully portable.
In the next few weeks, we will be posting a series of demonstration videos that will focus on these OS portability use cases. The first video in the series is available right now on our web site and on our YouTube channel. It shows how we can take an application that cannot be natively installed and used on Windows 7 (in this case, Windows Server 2003 Admin Pack) and then make it run on Windows 7. Next week, we will post a video showing you how you can take an application with dependencies on legacy versions of IE and Java and run it on Windows 7.
If you have any other use cases you'd like us to demonstrate, leave a comment below or contact us and let us know.
Thanks,
Alon Yaffe
Director of Marketing
InstallFree, Inc.
alon.yaffe@installfree.com
***No hedges, qualifiers or footnotes :-)