Access IT Automation Blog

Traditionally, application packaging and testing was a relatively siloed process done almost entirely by specialized teams. The application owners would submit a packaging or testing request and be available to supply further information, files, or data if needed. Other than that, they had to sit tight and wait. Also developers and technology and operations teams had to rely on the application packaging and testing teams — a process that could take weeks and hold up the development process or entire IT transformation projects.

Application packaging and testing isn't the same as it was 10 years ago. Traditionally, a somewhat siloed-off team took care of the actual process, but it would take days and sometimes weeks to find the right app owner, gather all the files and install instructions, and then cycle back with them again for UAT and sign-off. Now, with agile development and DevOps, this approach is impractical. For example, an internal developer might push out a new version of code three times a week and they cannot wait days every time to simply test it. Depending on what your development, packaging, testing, and release process looks like, you will need to choose a specific automation approach that is right for you.

In the past 11 months, we have released a lot of new and exciting features and sometimes it is hard to keep track of them all. To make it easier for you, we have created an Access Capture Release Notes page. You can subscribe to it and always get the latest updates sent to your inbox as soon as they are posted. But we also wanted to take the opportunity today to highlight some of the most valuable and impressive features in a dedicated blog post. Our development team, headed up by Nik Maloney, has gone above and beyond and I am very proud of the outcome.

Over the past couple of months we have written several articles about MSIX, and for good reason. Not only has MSIX replaced MSI as Microsoft's app packaging format, but it is also materially better than MSI. By using MSIX with App Attach, Windows Virtual Desktop, and FSLogix, the process of migrating, upgrading, and keeping your apps up-to-date, in a timely and efficient manner and without productivity loss, has never been easier or more achievable.

2020 has been a crazy year — there is no question about that. Suddenly having to switch to all of your employees working from home sent the vast majority of organizations scrambling, causing utter chaos. In fact, "companies spent an additional $15 billion a week on technology during the first wave of the pandemic, to ensure that employees could work from home safely," according to TechRepublic.

For the past five years (since the introduction of Windows-as-a-Service in 2015), we have talked about the necessity and benefits of Evergreen IT Management for enterprises. While both of those are still as relevant and crucial as before, there are new prevalent trends that will have a long-term impact on your Evergreen IT strategy. Today, I want to discuss the three most impactful ones: COVID-19 and the wide-spread adoption of remote work, Everything as Code (EaC), and Microsoft's Windows Virtual Desktop.

"Work-From-Home" (WFH) or "Work-From-Anywhere" (WFA) quickly became the new standard when countries went on lockdown in March due to the global pandemic of COVID-19. Despite an initial scrambling to get employees set up for remote work, companies are now starting to question the amount of physical office space and business trips needed in the future as employees were still productive at home.

Since its release last year, Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) has been gaining traction across multiple organizations, mainly those looking to provide a better user experience for their employees, have the latest security and feature updates, and reduce costs across their IT environment. Especially since March, WVD has become a solution that organizations started looking at for their company's needs as most of the global workforce had to suddenly work from home.

Despite improving app compatibility, application packaging is still a time-consuming, manual labor-intensive, and expensive obstacle organizations have to overcome. One reason is the ever-increasing number and complexity of applications within organizations, but more and more, the pace at which apps have to be packaged, tested, and deployed to keep pace with the velocity of change within the organization is becoming a huge roadblock.

With the release of Windows 10 2004 a few weeks ago and with MSIX AppAttach in public preview, Microsoft will soon start to incentivize customers to move to its new installer technology for Windows, MSIX. MSIX is set to replace the very popular Windows Installer (MSI) and the APPX packaging format that were previously used for Microsoft Store apps.

In the past 12 months, we looked at MSIX readiness for adoption (back in December 2018, I said it would start being ready for enterprise adoption in mid-2020) as well as laid out Access Capture's strategic roadmap to MSIX, which talked about Access Capture being able to automate the conversion of your legacy MSI and AppV apps to MSIX by Q4/2020.

Currently, MSIX can be used by devices running Windows 10 1803 and up, but what happens if you are still running some Windows 10 1709 or lower in your estate? That is where MSIX Core comes in!