App-V Beta Built for Office 2013 Beta
App-V, now nearly on version 5.0, is a cool product with a cooler history. Originally called Softgrid, it was acquired from a company called Softricity. Here is the short version of how it was built, as I recall it: Back in the early days of the Boston Computer Museum, there was an exhibit for kids. You know how kids are -- they will beat the heck out of any PC placed before them. The result? One broken PC. The founders of Softricity had to find a way to sandbox or virtualize these apps to keep them away from the registry and Windows DLLs.
Today that is App-V which creates a wrapper around apps, and streams them from a server.
What's interesting about the beta of App-V 5.0 is it can package up the preview of Office 2013.
So if you are bold enough to run beta software on top of beta software, and don't mind a bit of virtualization to boot, you might want to give it a try.
Oh, in case I forgot, I believe you have to be a Software Assurance customer to qualify.
Posted by Doug Barney on 07/27/2012 at 1:19 PM