Over three years ago, I posted a blog about converting applications from 4.6 to 5.0. It was just a little how to, I didn’t provide any commentary at the time. I did try to convert my applications when migrating to 5.0 at the time but I didn’t have a very high success rate. My strategy and the strategy that I suggested to others was go back to your recipe and just re-sequence with 5.0. I’m happy to report that has changed with 5.1.
It appears that the App-V product team worked with the feedback they received and made some serious improvements. The ability to first analyze the application for possible compatibility issues for 5.x still exists:
With 5.1 you’re actually less likely to get errors reported here (at least in my experience!) that is because the conversion logic itself has been improved. More of your App-V 4.6 package configuration can be detected and have an equivalent configuration created in the App-V 5.1 package. So, that’s good!
A great example of this can be seen in the screenshot above. In my App-V 4.6 package, I had a bat script (Script.bat) in my applications install directory, which I was calling as a pre-launch script with no timeout value. You can see that the converter has picked up on the script in my OSD file and interpreted it into an App-V 5.1 friendly method.
Now, the simple fact of the matter is that the release of App-V 5.0 resulted in some features being lost, which has been a struggle for many. For example, many App-V sequencers worked extensively with the OSD files which are no longer present in App-V 5.x. The configuration files in 5.x have some great new options and some of the old favorite options from 4.x OSDs but not all of them. While scripts do not have the same configuration settings available, they can still be run. So in this conversion, the converter will make a best guess and convert with the script in the package. This was a significant obstacle previously.
The conversion still won’t work for 100% of your App-V 4.6 applications but it’s now worth using! Odds are that you will have a decent success rate. If you are just starting your migration from 4.6, waiting until now has actually worked in your favor, you’ve now got a pretty dependable solution to help you expedite your move.
Thanks to Vignesh Waran for the tip to go revisit this!
