Last week, at AppManagEvent in The Netherlands, we declared that (finally) MSIX is ready to be the first choice for enterprises to choose when repackaging applications for delivery to Windows.
It has been a long road for MSIX. When introduced 6 years ago, we said two things about MSIX:
- It would become the future of applications, replacing App-V and eventually the MSI.
- It wasn’t ready.
But we believed in the technology and the promise for a more stable and secure way to prepare, deliver, and consume applications.
During this time we played our part in improving upon the open-source helper for MSIX, the Package Support Framework. We added new types of helpers (fixups), and improved the existing ones. We also provided tooling, both free community tooling and more advanced licensed software to help IT Pros leverage what MSIX could do for them.
Microsoft also played it’s part, initially helping IT Pros with a good capture engine, but in reality they have been focusing on the needs of developers. They have been quietly extending the limitations of what MSIX can do, through new extensions to the AppXManifest file used to declare the application integrations with the operating system, as well as changes in the new versions of the OS to support them.
So while the packaging tool lagged, failing to support these added features, we embarked on tooling to analyze the intent of the original software vendor and maximize the use of these new features to increase the level of compatibility between containerized applications and their original form. Our TMEditX product has proven itself to be the best way to get UAT-quality packages completed for MSIX.
Through our Report Cards on MSIX we have measured and reported on this progress and seen the level of UAT-level compatibility rise from 9 percent the first year to 82% in our report last January.
But as important as increasing the compatibility level is, we have also made it much easier to perform the packaging to produce those results, with deep analysis and automated repair functions that remove the need for detailed tracing and debugging to know what to fix for most applications.
And with additional tooling work we did this year, especially with solving some long-standing issues with COM, preliminary testing for next year’s report card indicates that we have now reached the 90% mark.
While we often hear enterprises ask for it, no packaging technology can cover 100% of an enterprise’s windows applications for delivery to every scenario, not even MSI. Our equivalent number for App-V was 97%, but end-of-life for App-V is rapidly approaching so organizations are making plans to move on.
At TMurgent, we feel that we are now at a point that Enterprises can choose to make MSIX the default choice to repackage applications. Repackaged to control updates and preconfigure the applications for use in their corporate environment, while protecting the application, other applications, and the OS itself from breakage. There will always be a need to deliver some applications with a second means, ether natively in the image or post-imaging delivery via another format, but at 90% we can make it the first choice.
So starting in October of 2024 we are declaring the beginning of “The Year of MSIX”. Contact TMurgent if you want to know where to start.
