Highlights of AppsAnywhere's User Day with Edinburgh Napier University

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Edinburgh Napier for their incredible hospitality as well as all of those in attendance, to whom our User Days owe their success! Videos of each of the presentations are available here; watch them below or use the panel to navigate.

What’s new at AppsAnywhere?

Transcript

For those that don't know me. I'm one of the directors at AppsAnywhere. I've been there about seven years. I was employee number eight. I'm actually based in Inverness. So this feels like my user day too. So I'm pretty excited about that. Out of all the people that we employ from Illinois to Austria, I'm our most northerly employee. So yeah, it's our 10th year anniversary. We've been going 10 years today. But I thought it was also interesting, it's taken us 10 years to hold a user day in Scotland. So when we finally done it. It's our first Scottish user day, we've got six universities at the moment in this part of the world. We might have seven if they're here today, so I won't embarrass them by saying who they are. But hopefully they come along and join us.

So just to go through some of the things that we've been up to this year. So one thing that we set out the start of the year, as most organizations do, we set our aims. And we really decided that we were going to refocus on higher education. So over the last two or three years there'd been interest from outside of higher education in our products and services. And we've kind of been intrigued and an interest in that. But we felt that as an organization, our values, our principles and our product really aligned with you guys. So we decided that we would refocus and everything that we designed do and develop and the way in which we operate and work is really about you guys. And about making sure that anything that we develop adds value to you and your student experience.

We've got some ambitious plans and some ambitious aims as an organization. So we've grown mainly in product development so we can enhance and improve the way in which we develop our products. To enable organizations to have more choice and more flexibility about how you work with us and Ryan will tell you more about that. I didn't do this deliberately, but I know after I put this together, the gray people are actually in finance. I don't know why they both have gray pictures, but I thought that was kind of curious after I put it together. So we've also added some people to help obviously as an organization that's dispersed over the world there's lots of different rules and regulations at different parts of the planet that we have to deal with.

I think excitingly we moved into our pub in the UK hot office. Well you recognize some of these people, but obviously Tony here playing darts. So that's a board meeting, a dartboard meeting. And you know that's given us a great place for us to call home. We were in a fairly bland ragis office before that. And now we feel that we've got something that represents our identity, which is kind of social and inclusive and fun. And we don't take ourselves too seriously. But we care passionately about what we do. So that's also given us the ability to grow. So we've got space in there for the future as well.

Just in terms of where we are. So this isn't an actual map. But obviously the Atlantic is a bit wider than that, but I've condensed it onto here. So you can start to understand this is our customer base across the Northern hemisphere. So the majority of our customers are represented here. We do have some customers outside of this zone. Especially exciting, we started with two universities in the Middle East this year, at Khalifa and Sharjah. So they're not on the map. But we're seeing the fastest growth I suppose that the most people coming to us from Europe and North America.

Just in terms of user days. This is our sixth user day this year. So we've done one in Toronto, we've done one in Germany, one in Spain, we did one in Middlesex. I know a lot of you folks have came to as well. So it's over 300 representatives from over 100 universities at our user days this year, which we're really proud of.

Okay. And then just to give you an idea of some of the things that we're doing with our customers. So really we see successes when we get to the point that an organization will work with us to help promote how they're doing things. How they've improved. It was wonderful earlier to hear that Claire was talking about her NSS results and that we may have been involved with it, the impact on that. Because really, our success is your success. At one show at the point that things are improving and people are happier with the service that you're offering them. We can feel proud of what we've achieved. If you want to go and check these out, these are on our websites.

So these are our webinars and videos that our customers have recorded about their projects and what they've done. Obviously this then starts to get picked up in the press. So university business and people like that start to want to talk to us about what we're doing. And share the knowledge that we have. Which is really the knowledge that you share with us and give to us. So it's a real group effort. And then there's plenty of ways to keep up with what we're doing and what our customers are doing.

Okay. So just a quick overview of what we've launched this year. So at the start of this year in spring we launched the packaging subscription. And the idea behind that was to try and enable people to be more efficient and not every organization packaging everything up from start every time. And really that was from feedback from these types of user days where we heard what you were saying, "Well actually why are we packaging the same app that the next university is packaging? Isn't there a way that you can help us out and deliver something that we can all use in a more cost effective and efficient way?"

At Middlesex, at the user day that we launched a version 2.7 which had a range of features. We also launched Analytics, which is a reporting engine that sits inside and monitors and looks at all the data and all the launches. And all the information that is captured inside apps anywhere. So that's really to enable you to get well, more return on investment from all the work that you're doing. And then today we're also going to share with you 2.8 and the features that we've been added to that. And we'll share some of the things that we've got planned for next year as we go through.

In terms of next year, we've got some really ambitious plans to grow. So just to give you an idea, over the last three years we added the same number of customers. So we have to support and develop for the same numbers customers as we worked within the first seven years. So we've kind of doubled the number of people we have to support and develop for. And we also need to find a better way to support and work with those people. Because well, they are all over the world. So it presents challenges to us and we've got some ambitious plans. There's some things that we're bringing into the product to enable you guys to have more choice about how the product works and how you stay up to date.

We want to maintain our satisfaction level, so we have a 98% net promoter score. Which is classed as world-class. But we want to maintain that. And the big challenge that we have and we're focusing on, is also ensuring that we don't lose too much of our identity. So as we grow we try and stay kind of software too and people represent our values and our philosophy and don't take themselves too seriously. We don't want to become another Microsoft or Citrix or a kind of faceless technology company.

So these superhero icons are where we've got open head counts. So people that we're looking to employ next year. We've also got some ambitious plans as I mentioned around the technology, around what our new delivery methods are coming out to the market. And making sure that we support and work with those about some of the integrations that we're going to tell you about today. And it's all higher education focus. So as I said earlier, everything that we're doing now, all the development is about getting more value, more features. More things that make hopefully your lives easier as a user of the product.

Okay. And just, before I finish, sorry, I'm going to embarrass you. But we love this video. And we think Michael, you produced so many cool videos about how you use apps anywhere. So we just thought we'd share this. If the sound works, I'll be amazed. But let's see. So this is Michael in his, is it a Land Rover? Looks like a Land Rover. He's in the middle of nowhere. And he's decided he wants to open a document or launch an app. So he's going to go into his car. And Apps Anywhere is here working from the dashboard of his a Land Rover. Is it connected to the internet? It must be yeah. So connected to the internet and launching apps from within is Land Rover. It's just proving that he is in the middle of nowhere. He's not cheating. But yeah, I suppose the challenge is if anyone can come up with a more innovative way of using Apps Anywhere, then we'd love to see it. We were amazed by this.

Okay, cool. It's on our website as well. And thanks Michael you're always kind of pushing the boundaries of what is sensible use at least. Okay, great. That's me. If anyone's got any questions or anything, wants to know anything about AppsAnywhere, or any of our plans, then please feel free to talk to me.

Edinburgh Napier's software delivery estate

Transcript

Hello everyone. So, my name's David Pentland, and I am a client services team manager here at Napier University in the information services group. I just thought I'd give you a very brief summary as to how we've got from where we were to where we are, and then introduce you to Clem is going to tell us a bit more about what we've done with AppsAnywhere here.

So, when I started here many, many years ago, this was the sort of PC that we had in the university, no hard disk, no networking, and basically the only way to get your operating system and your applications on there was via floppy disk, which you put in, switch the machine on, and it loaded them. So, you'd have to do that every single time. It worked. There weren't very many of them around, and we had very few applications, to tell you the truth, and the applications were so small you could load them at that time reasonably quickly. But that was the way it was.

Then moving on into the 1990s, we got hard disks in the machines, still not networked, so we would still have to go around every machine, load the operating system on and the applications on. Though this time, three and a half inch disk were not so floppy anymore, but they're still there. But anything that needed to change, you'd have to go around every machine and redo it all over again. It worked, but upgrades and changes were not easy at all.

Then the system here, where the operating system and the applications could be loaded over the network, so we had networking now and we had hard disks. So, a server could be built up with a bunch of files on there, which was basically Windows 3.11. When you switch the machine on, they'd all get downloaded fresh every time, so any applications could be put down as well. Again, the applications weren't totally big, weren't very many of them, and the operating system was fairly small. So, that was quite a good way of actually making sure that all the machines were completely set up and were working every morning when they got switched on, and if there was any problems with the machine, you can simply switch it on again and you'd get a fresh copy of everything down.

Data in those days was held on things like these. I've got a zip drive disc if no one's ever seen one before, so quite an interesting historical item. I'll leave that around if you want to have a look at that. And software in those days came in boxes. Don't come in boxes anymore. This one says, "To save wastage, only one disk size enclosed." So, this one happens to have three and a half inch, which says you're having a [duel 00:02:21] box with five and a quarter in it as well. So, that was how we installed our applications.

That obviously wasn't workable when we got to bigger operating systems like Windows XP, so at that point, we created a reference image, we Sysprepped that. We used PXE boot disks, which were okay to get the image across using a product called Ghost onto the hard disk of the machines, and we'd do that for student labs once a year, usually in the summer. And applications could either now be built into the image, or we could actually serve them from a data store on a share on a server. So, a bit more flexible. We could update some applications on the server, but if we needed to do anything that was in the image, we'd have to basically rebuild the image and put the new applications in, so better but not ideal.

hen things are getting really complicated, so we managed to get rid of the PXE boot disks and do PXE boot over BIOS over the network. So, that was an improvement, much easier to manage, but we still had an image with, this time, Windows 7 in it. We're now using a Windows deployment services instead of Ghost, to move those images onto the machines. We've got a script that we ran after imaging called Wind [inaudible 00:03:35] which was basically a way of configuring a PC with anything needed in a specific area. So, we'd have to decide, "Oh, this application needs to be here or this application needs to be there." Wind [inaudible 00:03:45] would then install that locally after imaging. We've also introduced Novell ZENworks applications, which could deploy applications through either MSI or to simply link to them over the data share onto PCs. You could also do a bit of a overnight application deployment. And we also had a virtual desktop service by this time where we have a golden master, which has some applications in it, and we also ThinApp for some of those applications, which is a virtualization technology from VMware.

So, basically, everything was getting really complicated because applications are now available from all these different areas, deployed in all these different ways, and unfortunately, it usually meant that nothing was quite where it should be for what the students and staff wanted. And it was really hard to manage. So, finally, about a year and a half, two years ago now, we decided that AppsAnywhere was a good replacement for all these different methods, and in combination with SCCM, and possibly Intune in the future, then we are pushing applications out through SCCM. We are still doing some imaging, but in the future we may just take the operating system that comes on the machine, make sure it's an SCCM and make sure the applications are then deployed in a scheduled task, and everything else is coming from AppsAnywhere.

And that's allowing us to serve all the applications to people where they need them on both physical machines, on both virtual desktops, and increasingly on mobile devices, which is a bit of a thrust for the university to try and make people more easily mobile with laptops and so forth, and working from home as well. As Claire said, we have a lot of overseas students, and AppsAnywhere is helping us deliver those applications to them as well. So, that's a whistle stop, too, of where we are, and I'll now let Clem tell you a bit more about how we've AppsAnywhere here. Thank you.

Hello everybody. I'm Clem Clark, lead technical developer in the client services team. I'm about to give you a quick idea of what we do here at client services team. Probably where most of you are really an end user computing area, dealing with all the desktops that are out there. Windows, Mac, all the MDM devices, tablets, and phones. We've also got a virtual desktop infrastructure, as Dave mentioned earlier, which is a little bit more of a challenge than the standard physical desktops that we have, and of course, we have to deliver the applications and licenses across all of these devices. We also have to deal with the printing and MFDs, as well as delivering everything from SCCM updates, Windows updates, group policy, basically just keeping all the physical devices and virtual devices up and running, which is a bit of a nightmare sometimes. I'm sure you will all agree. It's quite a lot of areas to get your hands stuck into here, and quite more often than not we also end up dealing with not just third line support, but second and first line support coming our way as well. So, trying to keep projects running is a bit tricky because we're always having to deal with support on the backend.

Thought I'd just take you through a bit more in depth from what Dave was saying. Maybe not go back to the 1980s to get to AppsAnywhere here. But quite recently we were using Novell ZENworks as our configuration manager. Novell ZENworks is a big configuration manager, a bit like SCCM, we were really using it more for applications and full application delivery. There was a couple of little tweaks that we do for modifying the registry and so on, but it was really our application delivery method completely. So, there was a portal of sorts that students and staff could use to be able to launch an application, and when you launch this application it would just, essentially, install an MSI or it could run an executable directly from the network. Obviously, installing an MSI on demand is not the best way for students to go about things when you're in a class. Some of these applications can be huge and take a long time to install.

So, unfortunately, we couldn't always use ZENworks to deploy that applications on demand. But it did have an agent on the device which runs the system user, so the students who obviously were not admins would not have any problems in actually installing any of these applications or did any registry tweaks they might have to do afterwards. It was very handy. If there was a problem, if an application was deployed, we could make a slight adjustment to the app in ZENworks, registry key, file delivery, permissions, anything like that, run a command line of any sort, and it would be delivered for the student.

The portal, as such, was a static window, which we made sure students couldn't close, but it also did publish applications in the Start menu as well. What we did have to do quite often, though, because we were delivering MSIs, most of the time through ZENworks, was not often builder on, although we have done it sometimes. We'd have to tweak the MSIs used to work correctly, so we used Adminstudio, which is the biggest, probably, product that you get for building MSIs. Most of the time we would just create an MST, which is a transform to see... If you wanted to install an application, you just needed to have a couple of registry keys or a property, and we use the MST to do that. And we use Adminstudio to build a MST as well. We had a license with ZENworks for that. It was a basic license. Sometimes we needed to do a bit more and we had to buy the bigger application, which was an additional cost on top of the ZENworks cost.

But as Dave mentioned, installing the MSIs is a huge task sometimes, especially if it's a big, big apps, so at Image Time, we did have this process of detecting what lab you're in, putting the big apps on afterwards, and making sure they were ready for the students as soon as they were there. One of the problems that we had is, with virtual desktop, obviously running shared CPUs memory on servers is a little bit more restrictive for the users, so we had to come up with some clever ways of getting applications working there. One of the security situations that we have here is that we destroy the desktops after you're logged off, so installing an MSI on demand not only takes a long time, but it was gone the next time you came to another desktop. So, you'd have to do it every time. This was not a good situation.

So, VMware, who we use for virtual desktop, had a product called ThinApp, which essentially, would capture your application, a little bit like you do with Clay Pigeon Studio. However, it was very, very clunky. It was basically a command prompt. It would say, "Launch your applications," launch it, and then you just, in the command prompt say, "I'm done." You couldn't really see what was happening. You couldn't really tweak the registry, couldn't really tweak the files properly. It was very difficult to use, and it wasn't very good, really. We could only get a few of the applications, a few of the easier applications, onto VMware. We couldn't put the big, big apps that everyone really wants to use.

And finally, it was licensed our VDI situation, but we couldn't use it everywhere. We could use it everywhere if everyone just paid for it, but it was very costly. So, we've come up to the situation that we're running MSIs for some people, we're running ThinApps for other people. Might having to install things at image time, and essentially, there's a bit of disparity between all the versions that are out there. Maybe the capture in ThinApp is not quite the same as the MSI that's been fully installed, so the students aren't getting the best experience overall.

So, I had this great idea to speak to AppsAnywhere, get them in to see if they could unify all of this, basically. See if they could make it simpler to get the same application to everybody across the board, and they've done it. Simple as that. Instead of going to the AdminStudio to capture an MSI or to build a new MST to tweak the application, or instead of having to go to ThinApp to do it, we can just do it all in one place, keep it all uniform, make sure everybody has the same version across the board, and it has the same experience every time. We can deliver more on virtual desktops because of this. Essentially, the capturing process is much better. Much, much better in AppsAnywhere than it is in ThinApp, and we've got consistency. So, almost all our apps now can get to virtual desktop no problem at all.

What was really important for us is there is still a few apps that we want to run from a network share, small apps, want to run a few applications, and it has, obviously, it has that ability to do so. And bonus that we have is we can allow the students to access this from home, which we never had before, obviously. I'm sure management liked the fact that we have reduced some costs across the board as well. So, that is where we are. There's a few test ones in there because that's my own account there, but you've all seen the portal, of course, so I'm not going to dwell on it too much. But much, much nicer portal than we had than with ZENworks. And I suppose we could click on it. Will it work?... As live demos go, this is probably the easiest one to do, just thinking about it. So, this is obviously a Bring Your Own Device. I'm on the wifi here, so I'm not being passed through straight away.

And you can see the egg, as we like to call it, on the front screen there, which you passed this morning. It's very War of the Worlds looking device... So, hopefully it'll... Oh, yes, we're all good.

[inaudible 00:13:31].

So, as many of you will have, we can't have the full set of suites of applications available off campus or for Bring Your Own Device just due to some licensing restrictions. So, yep, another quick quick tour of how we got to AppsAnywhere, really. So, most people here are using AppsAnywhere. I think there's... I can see a couple of yellow ones who are just getting interested in it. I don't know how far you've gone with that yet, but most people will have experienced the portal. Most people have probably done a lot of Cloudified apps. I don't know if you've done any yourselves. So, I didn't want to dwell on much of that. I wanted to talk about things outside the portal and how we've managed to interact with Cloudpaging player rather than just talking about the portal and talking about Cloudpaging itself.

So, one of the things that AppsAnywhere provide is the PowerShell module. It's available in forums. Essentially, it lets you talk to the Cloudpaging player on the client. It's free to downloads, and here's a little snippet of it, if you're interested in a bit of code. You can see from this, it's just saying, "Stop Cloudpaging," and it's a simple function that will stop the Cloudpaging player. There's obviously plenty of functions in there, but we use this ourselves to try and give the user a better experience, particularly to add applications at login so they're available for the user. So, the example I've got here is Endnote, I'm sure everyone knows Endnote. It's got a Cite While You Write plugin for Word. So, if the user wants to use that plugin in Word, if it's not been loaded previously, they would have to go to the portal, load Endnote, which will no doubt bring up the entire Endnote application. They don't want that. They then have to go to Word and then run the Cite While You Write plugin to do their work.

So, we were thinking, should be put in the image? Should we make it always available? So, I came up with the option of using the Cloudpaging player to do the work for me, so when the user logs in, it puts it Endnote into the player and it's all ready. It doesn't launch it. It's all ready to go, and so the Cite While You Write plugin is ready to go. We could do other things as well, so we can detect what's in the player already, what's running, what's not running, and stop and start services as necessary on the machine. And we can also remove applications from the player, as well. To launch the application, all we need to know is the S2URI, that's the link that you click when you click Launch in the portal.

And this is probably the most exciting slide of the day, but this is an actual link from the portal. So, that that URI will launch Cloudpaging app, but maybe we don't' actually want to load the app. So, like with Endnote, we don't actually want to bring it up every time a user logs in, we just want to make sure it's loaded in the player so all the resources are there. To do that, unless I want to create a duplicate, which I don't want to do, I have to offer multiple delivery methods, which is on the left hand side there, for Endnote, and then create a new Cloudpaging delivery method which is set to not auto run. And when I do that, and it got to the portal, I can see multiple launch methods right there. And actually, if I hover over the bottom one, you can see in the link bar at the bottom, you can see that URI that I just posted earlier. And that's, essentially, what's happening when you're clicking that, it's just launching that URI.

Once we've got that, we can get rid of the multiple delivery methods, because we don't want to show the student that on the portal, but we must keep the delivery method there because the URI will still be active. So, here's a little example, PowerShell script that I have. Basically, a Start app is a function I've written, and I'm passing a couple of things to it there, the name of the application, as it appears in the Cloudpaging player and, of course the URI. And the commands that I use in my function, the first one simply detects if the app name, being Endnote X9, in this case, is found in the player, and I can use a simple PowerShell start process to run the URI, which will load it up. And that's part of my function there.

Let's have a little example, shall we. See if it works. So, this is the virtual desktop service. Hopefully... All right. We are actually, pretty much, Windows 10 across the board. I've just picked this. This is just one of my test pools. I picked Windows 7 because I've got quite a lot of stuff set up in it, just to make it easier for the presentation, but of course this works with Windows 10 not problem at all. So, this is how I was connected to the Windows desktop service. I haven't done anything though, and the app is launching right there. And unfortunately, I can't see the Cloudpaging player. I'll have to pop it here. Try that again. It's not loaded down there, but it should be. And you can see Endnote X9 is there and ready to go.

So, the next thing we've also done is use the network cache functionality, so rather than caching your applications directly onto the PC itself, we use the cache directly on the network. Increases performance slightly on large apps because it doesn't have the cache on demand. Although, I have put in there, we haven't measured the speed increase, so we take AppsAnywhere's word for that, that it is working. But for us, it's very important because of the VDI situations. We want to increase speed as much as we can. VDI, when you get a new desktop, and you don't have something previously cached. Also, it obviously reduces our IOPS, which in VDI is extremely important. However, it does require a little bit of extra disk space, and you should have a a good fast connection.

So, we're not using this for home use. We're using this on VDI alone. There's a few things we need to get it done, which is the GUID of the app, we need to have the STC file, and we need to have a network point to store it on. So, basically, we need to get the GUID. Now, there's probably a better way of doing this, but the way that we would do it was we would either find it while we were doing the Cloudpaging capture in the studio, or even when we start the application itself, we can see it there. So, that's a standard Cloudified app just running directly in the player, and we can have a look in the log file and get the GUID. So, once we know that GUID, we need to get the file.

So, here's our STP, our Cloudpage application. If you unzip your STP, this is what's inside. If none of you ever done it before, I'm sure a lot of you have, maybe some of the newer guys, you will need to know some of this information for your exam if you do it. But the interesting ones there, the CAEs, probably, you can actually see the batch files for activation and virtualization. You can go in and have a look and can actually see what they're doing. You've got the icon file, you've got the token file, which is your license, as such, to run in the Cloudpaging player, and the STC, which is the big bulk of the application. So, we copy that STC file to our network share, we rename it with the GUID underscore file, and we'll leave it there. It's now available to use as a network cache.

So, we just need three registry keys on the client to actually make use of it. We enable the cache, we say we'll use it as a T-drive, is where we want to use it from, and the location of where it is on the network. When you're using it, you do see this, unfortunately, in the Explorer, so we use an extra little register key just to hide that drive to make sure it's not visible to anybody. If you do see that in the Explorer, you can actually nav