UE-V 2.0 and App-V 5. SP2 Beta

UE-V focuses on providing a personal and flexible experience for the end user, being simple and versatile for the IT Pro to enable what applications should have their settings roam, and be easily integrated and can scale through your existing tools and infrastructure. UE-V 2.0 continues to deliver on these focus area by:

1. Supporting Windows 8 apps enabling you to personalize these apps across your devices.
2. Providing tools giving you flexibility to control how your own applications and personal settings roam with the new Company Settings Center.
3. Delivering enhancements to the underlying sync engine to optimize the integration and scalability of UE-V with your existing infrastructure.

Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V). App-V enables anywhere access to virtualized applications on any authorized PC without application installs. Microsoft’s has a long history of providing flexible application virtualization with powerful management, and making the virtual application behave as if it was locally installed. App-V 5.0 SP2 builds on these solutions through the following new features:

1. Shell extension support, enriching the user experience.
2. Sequencing enhancements, simplifying the virtual application creation process.

More information can be found here;

App-V 5 RTM

App-V 5.0 helps businesses provide employees with access to virtually any application anywhere, without having to install the application directly on their computers. App-V 5.0 is a major release and includes many new capabilities to enhance the interaction with virtual applications as well as the administrative experience for IT departments. Improvements include:

• Integrated Platform: In App-V 5.0 virtual applications leverage Windows standards for a consistent user experience and work more like traditionally installed applications. This means that people don’t have to change the way they use an application just because it’s virtual. It also makes it easy for IT departments to work with virtual applications; this enhanced capability is called Virtual Application Extension.
• Flexible Virtualization: With App-V 5.0 businesses can connect individually packaged App-V applications and enable them to communicate with each other as well as with natively installed applications. This gives businesses the best of both worlds, providing isolation to reduce application conflicts and time spent regression testing – yet allowing applications to interact and communicate when needed. This new capability is called Virtual Application Connection.
• Reducing Storage Barriers to VDI: App-V 5.0 is designed to be easy and efficient to use in VDI environments, allowing IT departments to make the best use of expensive disk resources. They can simply choose to turn off local application storage and dramatically reduce the disk requirements for VDI while still streaming applications. This is called Shared Content Store.
• Improved Administration for IT: With App-V 5.0 IT departments will find it easier to centrally manage application interaction as well as administer App-V via the new web-based Admin UI. For those who prefer automation, PowerShell is ready for use with packaging and performing tasks on both the server and client.

More information can be found here and here;

Microsoft Office 2013 Preview AppV packages

Virtualized Office 2013 Preview packages for AppV 5.0 Beta deployments is now available here;

Microsoft App-V 5.0 (Beta 2) now available

App-V 5.0 Beta 2 now supports Office 2013 Customer Preview which will now be delivered as an App-V package directly to customers. Now you can roll it out quickly and easily, providing on-demand access, co-existence with previous Office versions and integration with local applications – no Office Deployment Kit required.

In addition:

- Reporting: App-V 5.0 Beta 2 now allows you to report on virtual application inventory and utilization, helping IT departments track software assets throughout the enterprise.

- Integration with the System Center Configuration Manager 2012: With the upcoming release of Service Pack 1 for System Center Configuration Manager 2012, you will be able to manage App-V 5.0 Beta 2 virtual applications throughout their lifecycle.

- End-to-end programmability: App-V 5.0 Beta 2 adds PowerShell automation to the management server and the sequencer. For those IT Pros who prefer to get under the hood you now have complete programmability and automation for virtual application management and packaging.

More information can be found here.
Download beta here.