Application Deployment & Virtualization

Backstory: (If you don’t want to read all my mad ramblings, then go directly to the part “Our tool” = ) During our previous Windows Xp to Windows 7 migration (2013-2014) we upgraded approximately 13000 computers, then as now we were using Broadcom (formerly Symantec) CMS(Altiris) for deployment, and ended up repackaging over 400 different virtual packages with Symantec SEV (Symantec Endpoint Virtualization). That format was great for compatibility, and for the most parts it worked pretty well once you knew it's bugs and quirks, but we had to throw it away after Symantec made us aware in early 2017 they would EOL it from the summer of 2018. After a lot of research and testing, we decided that our Windows 7 to Windows 10 migration would be all about APP-V. That way we could also reuse most of our new App-V packages on our current Citrix environment, and in future VDI solutions. We were concluding it is the only virtualization tool big enough not going EOL on short notice like ...

In the past I would consider ” SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office ” as very easy   to sequence, and 7.15 hf3 was working well without doing anything special. But after we tried to sequence the latest 8.2 version on W10 build 1809 with Office 2019 (x86) installed into the Os , we had some problems getting the COM plugin to load when we put the package in a Connection group with lots of other packages.(Worked   sometimes when deployed with just a runvirtual key to Office) We tried both with and without different VSTO versions   in the base Os , and also tried to seq. it into the package for testing. And we even tried Seq. on 1709 and with Office 2013 (x86) in base with no luck. So I had to investigate further using a Procmon trace of the manual install vs the sequenced install, and noticed the correct COM entry’s was not created during startup with the package in CG using the create entry’s in the package. This entry seems to be the place where it creates th...