Access IT Automation Blog

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.

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!

As technology changes at an ever increasing rate, being able to quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively test your applications is fundamental to keeping up with the pace. Depending on your testing strategy, this could include all of your apps or just specific core applications.

Since full-blown manual application testing of all applications several times a year is too expensive, takes too long, and requires an extensive amount of resources, automated smoke testing is often used to quickly test a large number of apps. To help you with this, we are excited to share with you today two new features of Access Capture that we have just released: smoke testing and automated performance testing.

If I would take the conversations I have with our clients, prospects, and partners as an indication, I would say that about 90% of enterprise IT teams are interested in Evergreen IT, but maybe only about 20% of them fully grasp the concept enough to know how to practically implement it. And it is an ambiguous concept unless you take the time to research it. This is made harder by the fact that, besides very few information sources, there isn't much information out there.

Over the past years, Access Capture has helped organizations around the world package and test applications faster, safer, more accurately, and more efficiently in an enterprise environment by automating much of the labor-intensive, costly, and tedious process.

In October 2019, we released Access Capture Version 3 which included many feature and platform improvements. We were thrilled how well it was received so we cannot wait to share with you some details on our jam-packed development calendar for 2020.

When I started application packaging twenty years ago, Microsoft had only just released its installer called MSIEXEC.EXE. The primary goal of Microsoft Installer was to create a generic way to install and uninstall applications on Windows while allowing you to manage and version-control in a structured way.

Back then, Microsoft needed this for its new Office 2000 setup routine on Windows NT and Windows 95 to ensure that each installation of this complicated set of applications behaved and functioned post installation.

If your organization is running Office 2010 and has LOB critical macros or apps, you have a hard deadline of October 13, 2020 to migrate, or you risk continuing to use those apps and macros while running a vulnerable, unsupported version of Office.

Unlike for Windows 7, which goes End-of-Life 9 months earlier on January 14, 2020, Office 2010 will not have extended support, paid or otherwise. This means no security or critical updates, no phone or chat support, it will not be available to download from the Microsoft site, and most online help content will be retired as well. So even if your enterprise puts off migrating to keep certain macros working, you could face issues that affect the entire Office Suite and beyond.

After a bit of a rough year, things are starting to look up: Gartner predicts that IT spending will bounce back to a healthy growth rate of 3.7% in 2020 — largely due to enterprise software spending.

John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, said: “The slowdown in IT spending in 2019 is not expected to stretch as far into 2020 despite concerns over a recession and companies cutting back on discretionary IT spending. [...] Most companies are caught trying to either cut costs or invest for growth, but the top-performing enterprises are doing both. A core challenge facing the industry is how organizations can operate as both a traditional company and a technology company at the same time. These ‘and’ dilemmas will drive future IT spending trends.”

As you might already know, Access Capture V3 will be launched on November 14th, 2019. The new release includes lots of new exciting features and platform improvements. Last week, we walked you through some of them already and today, as promised, I would like to highlight some additional nuggets, in particular:

1. Enhanced structured logging with multiple sinks out of the box (e.g., ELK stack)
2. New messaging design to allow subscriptions to notifications
3. Virtual machines presented within the browser
4. Environments now support multiple deployment systems
5. New publishing environment type