A few weeks ago, I attended a presentation on InstallFree. InstallFree combines application virtualization and management. It looks a little like Thinstall, but also provides a desktop on a USB stick like Mojopack. Because I was impressed by the demonstration I requested a evaluation version.
Today I have installed the evaluation of InstallFree Bridge. InstallFree Desktop is not yet available as an evaluation package.
The evaluation package of InstallFree Bridge is more like a technology preview than a full product evaluation. The installation is a set of instructions and not an installation wizard like most products. After manually creating and filling the file server with packages, the InstallFree Management Console is started for basic configuration. An Active Directory is used for application assigning.
The InstallFree Management Console is intuitive and so easy to use. Assiging applications to users is as easy as selecting the application you want to provide at user level or organizational unit level.
After assigning the applications, the pre-configured InstallFree Bridge (agent) has to be launched from the users desktop. The evaluation guide lets you copy the Bridge to the %APPDATA% location, but you can change the ifbhook.cfg file to have it run from %PROGRAMFILES% and store personal data in %APPDATA%.
The InstallFree Bridge runs under user credentials. The Bridge provides a ‘virtual’ shell allowing shell extensions. Products like VMware Thinstall and Microsoft SoftGrid lack this possibility.
The pre-packaged applications run without any problems from the InstallFree Bridge on Windows XP. Windows Vista is not yet supported. Vista support is currently being tested and will probably be available short after the GA release.
Making an application available offline takes a long time and the Windows explorer shell crashes a few times. This is already fixed in a new release.
InstallFree Encapsulator generates self-contained InstallFree Virtual (IFV) applications. These virtual applications include the entire set of resources required for running the applications without having to install them on a host computer. The Encapsulator has its own complete and sterile computing environment which is based on our patent-pending technology, the IFV Core Engine. Some of these self-contained IFV applications are part of the evaluation package as well. Unfortunately the Encapsulator itself is not part of the evaluation.
If I examine the shortcut to the ‘virtual’ applications I mention that they run from a ‘Virtual Drive’ V:. When opening the V: drive from within an application, you can see that each application has its own virtual file system to prevent application conflicts. The Bridge also adds a V: drive to non virtual applications, this V: drive contains only the connectivity layer of the application — this layer is also not conflicting.
After playing a while the the InstallFree Bridge I conclude that the technology is pretty cool and very easy to manage. The binaries still need some work.
Sign up for your own evaluation here.
I would like to thank Netzer Shlomai for his comments.
Tags: installfree
