Sean Crookston

Beyond following the steps to create your bare machine that will be used for packaging and following the steps to successfully create packages using ThinApp, you will want to consider how ThinApp will look structurally in your environment.

You may choose to deploy the solution in with View, and you may just be implementing them together with an existing physical desktop environment. Further you may find you want to create packages that are on the local machine, or you may choose to run the packages over the network.

Regardless one excellent feature of ThinApp called AppLink will allow you to create smaller packages by using a single instance of components that are installed many times over in your environment.For example, Java or .net. Additionally you can leverage this capability to keep each of your application packages separate from their components, allowing the capability to update the flash component without having to repackage your Firefox or Internet Explorer ThinApp.

For use with a non-mobile PC, the best setup is to host the applications on a share, with a separate folder for you plugin components.

Next you would package all the components you have identified as being components that will be utilized or shared by my multiple applications. For example you will likely want most if not all of the following. Additionally you will likely want multiple versions of applications such as Microsoft.Net and Sun Java to be utilized by applications with different requirements.

Adobe Flash http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-13144

Adobe Reader(for use with embedded PDF files with web browser applications)   http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-13095

Adobe Shockwave http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-13137

Apple Quicktime http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-13122

Microsoft Silverlight http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-13145

Microsoft .Net http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2008/11/step-by-step-in.html http://blogs.egroup-us.com/?p=1292

Sun Java http://blogs.vmware.com/thinapp/2008/10/step-by-step-in.html

http://communities.vmware.com/thinap.jspa?sortOrder=1&sortField=0&publisher=SUN&appName=JAVA&complexity=

Finally you will create your main ThinApp packages, pointing these applications to use the plugins folder. In the Package.ini for each application you will want to set the OptionalAppLinks parameter. If you want to explicitly use certain plugins set the parameter as shown below:

OptionalAppLinks=plugins\*.exe;plugins\*.dat

To specify only certain plugins set the parameters as shown below:

OptionalAppLinks=plugins\flash.exe;plugins\dotnet3.dat;plugins\java1_6_2.exe

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