Yesterday I wrote a post (https://www.tmurgent.com/TmBlog/?p=2921 ) because of concerns regarding App-V and MSIX over comments made by a Microsoft employee at MMS. At the time I said “don’t panic”, and was working behind the scenes to see if we could get a public clarification over what I knew couldn’t be true.
Last night (for me here in Europe; Thursday back home in the US) Andrew Clinick, who it the most senior person at Microsoft that I know of in charge of this whole area, sent out a series of tweets to help clarify the intended message:
App-V is not under active development but it is supported in Windows 10. We will work closely with our App-V customers to ensure that their requirements are met by the future of app deployment, MSIX in conjunction with SCCM/InTune.
Once we have validated with customers that their requirements are met then we will provide clear guidance and assistance to move forward with Windows application deployment.
We highly encourage customers to start working with Microsoft on #MSIX today and utilize the extensive ecosystem support from our app deployment tools vendors and partners.
Cool the #MSIX packaging tool (microsoft.com/en-us/p/msix-p…) has App-V 5.x to MSIX conversion tools today. Of course your favorite packaging tool also supports #MSIX today as well which make it easier to migrate too
Gotta love that 144 character style communication.
OK. Maybe it is not the lifecycle document for in-the-box App-V we might like, but Andrew was pretty clear that App-V isn’t going away until there is a viable replacement, and it is pretty clear that on then would there be an announcement be some kind of reasonable deprecation period to ensure customers have ample time to complete migrations. Which is about what I expected was intended, but needed Microsoft to say.
So let’s all relax again and be calm. Have a great weekend, and on Monday we can all get back to provisioning those crusty old apps to our awesome end-users.
