Last month the well-known community forum softgridguru.com moved to the new Appvirtguru.com site. Here is the note Ruben Spruijt left behind on softgridguru.com:

After 20 years it’s time for some changes.
We want to inform you about the fact that the softgridguru.com content is moved to www.appvirtguru.com.

The goal of Appvirtguru.com is to provide deep technical information about Application Virtualization in general.
The first phases of AppVirtguru.com are:
- Provide a well moderated forum about App-V; current situation
- Provide a well moderated forum about AppVirt solutions such as VMware, Citrix, Symantec, InstallFree, Novell, Xenocode,.. (early 2010);
- Upgrade and extend the current platform. (early 2010)
- Change style; colors and logos (early 2010)
- Fix SMTP and registration issues (end 2009)

Keep a close eye on this site. I will contribute to the new forum in the near future.

At VMworld 2009 in San Francisco I visited the InstallFree booth. And while I was there, the guys from InstallFree showed me this concept of the universal client, where you package/virtualize your applications once and run those applications on XP, Vista, Windows 2008 and Windows 7. “Is this so special?” I thought to myself. Well, actually it is. Where some of the vendors will make it sound very easy to migrate to a new OS when using their application virtualization solution, in fact it isn’t. Sure, in some cases you don’t need to repackage your applications, but at least you have to certify if the package still works on the new OS.  Read the rest of this entry »

Finally we are ready to release the updated release of the Application Virtualization comparison chart! In this release we’ve updated all the products to the latest version and we’ve added test-results of application launch-times. We didn’t want the document to contain a lot of text describing what application virtualization is, all the ins and outs of every product in the  chart and the complete test-setup and how the tests were performed. We wanted the document to be as short as possible, easy to understand the differences between the solutions and a quick overview what the differences are in launch-times. Read the rest of this entry »

We are currently updating our application virtualization comparison chart. The one thing I’m most excited about is that we’ve added the launch times of a couple of applications you might want to virtualize. We have planned to release the updated chart this month, but I wanted to give you a sneak peak at the launch times of Adobe Acrobat 9.1 when virtualized with the featured products. In the chart you see the first launch and the second launch. The second launch is to see the difference when (some of the blocks of) the package is cached on disk or in memory. Read the rest of this entry »

InstallFree released a ROI-calculator which allows you to calculate the current costs and possible savings of an organization when using InstallFree to virtualize the applications:

InstallFree provides application virtualization software that is used by enterprises to lower the cost and complexity of delivering and managing applications. This approach utilizes the existing infrastructure in an Enterprise, while showing dramatic results in reducing the overall cost of application management.

InstallFree has created the “InstallFree Return on Investment (ROI) Calculator” to help Enterprises understand their own current costs and measure the immediate savings an InstallFree implementation has on the organization.

I don’t know how real these numbers are, but I do believe that application virtualization solutions like InstallFree lowers the operational costs of managing applications in an organization.