Never Install an Application to a PC Again

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How would you like to eliminate the tedious installation of new and upgraded
software onto the many PCs in your far-flung company?

That’s been the Holy Grail of corporate computing for some time — and
now the problems that have kept this from becoming a widespread reality
are being solved.

How Centralized Software Management Breaks Down

Companies using Windows Server 2000 or 2003 — and trying to eliminate
their software installation chores — have generally added Microsoft
Terminal Services for connectivity and
Citrix MetaFrame servers for application hosting.

Unfortunately, a variety of headaches that are typical of Windows apps
have frustrated some of the best-laid plans:

• DLL Hell.
Different programs often conflict with each other when run from an
application server. This includes “DLL Hell,” in which two apps require
incompatible dynamic link libraries, and other maddening gotchas.

• Intolerant versioning.
It’s often necessary for an end user to run two different versions of the
same application to tap into documents that were developed at separate times.
One legacy data set, for example, might be available only by using Microsoft
Access 97, whereas a newer dataset is only compatible with Access XP. The
same PC, however, cannot run both versions of these programs.

• Mandatory Profile Problems.
To support users who may log in at different workstations at various times,
IT administrators can institute “mandatory profiles” that store each
person’s configuration settings. When users are roaming, however, they cannot
save changes they make to their application preferences.

These problems have largely been solved by new products such as Softricity’s
SoftGrid. This add-on software, which integrates with Windows Server and
MetaFrame, establishes a so-called SystemGuard layer. The technique
virtualizes not only multiple instances of the Windows operating system,
but also provides a separate Registry for each application. This permits
different profiles and versions of the same app to run without conflicts,
while allowing the same cut-and-paste functionality between processes that
would be possible on a stand-alone PC.

Virtualizing Windows and Anything That Uses It

Early versions of SoftGrid, released in 2001 and 2002, were
promising but “clunky,” according to software reviewers such as
Brian Madden, the author of the Citrix MetaFrame XP guidebook. The
recent 3.0 release of SoftGrid, however, gained power and performance
that’s attracting notice. The new package is already being employed by such
corporations as AIG, Prudential, and Raytheon, according to David Greschler,
Softricity’s vice president of marketing.

SoftGrid isn’t a magic wand that works for you without any effort. At a
minimum, it requires a manual “sequencing” process
that readies each end-user application for distribution on a network:

• Preparation.
SoftGrid-TS, a module that requires Terminal Services and MetaFrame XP, is
installed on an administrative workstation running, for example, Windows 2000
Professional. This machine is where your applications initially will be set up.

• Sequencing.
Installing an application on the admin workstation allows SoftGrid-TS to
analyze the components of the program. This process produces an .SFT file
— which contains the entire application, broken down into small
building blocks — and an .OSD file with pointers to the blocks.
These files allow end users to run an application locally. The app is never
installed on their PCs and the possibility of conflicts between two programs
or two versions of the same program is eliminated. With the proper licensing,
this is no copyright violation. In fact, Softricity is a Microsoft
industry partner and integrates with the Redmond company’s Systems
Management Server (SMS) for electronic application delivery.

• Upgrading.
Besides the convenience of not having to touch any local machines to
install applications, corporations gain the benefit of easy upgrades.
When a patch or an upgrade to an application is released by a vendor, you
simply install the change to your original, “sequenced” file. SoftGrid-TS
produces a new .SFT file that incorporates the new version of the
application. Copying this .SFT file to the content server makes it
immediately available to end users. Alternately, admins can choose to make
both the old and the new versions available to users during a transition period.

SoftGrid’s newest version supports laptops as well as desktop PCs. Portable
computers can be configured to automatically download and install supported
apps, which will run locally for any period of time you authorize.

Softricity has some competitive overlap with companies such as
Exent Technologies,
whose approach is used to deliver (among other things) Yahoo.com’s
Games-on-Demand service across the Web. Other players in the space include
Stream
Theory, Appstream, and
Egenera.

Without conducting an analysis of your needs, it’s impossible to say which
of these competing offerings is “best.” Each has features that may fit your
corporate environment.

Conclusion

Count up the hours that your IT professionals now spend visiting individual
PCs throughout your company and upgrading various versions of existing
software. If this overhead cost is significant, you should be thinking
about moving to centralized software distribution.

This tactic is gaining strength as the maturity of the new tools earns
them some much-needed respect. Last month, for instance, the consulting
group Gartner Inc. named Softricity one of
five cool vendors in client-side computing.

The first time you “install” a major upgrade to every PC throughout
your company — by simply “turning on” a new distribution file
— you may be very glad you adopted this approach.