Connection Groups (or Dynamic Suite Composition v2) in App-V 5.0 are great for enabling separate App-V packages to talk to each other. Connection Groups are easy enough to deploy with the App-V Management Server or Configuration Manager 2012; however that isn’t the case for stand-alone scenarios or 3rd party ESDs.

One of the great promises of application virtualization is dynamic delivery of software to end-points; however delivering plugins or add-ons to installed (i.e. not virtualized) software has thus far been a stumbling block.

Two recent releases presents an opportunity to revisit the state of virtualizing Apple iTunes. iTunes 11 looks great, but is it just lipstick on a pig? Under the hood, it doesn’t appear to differ that much from previous versions, but lets see whether a combination of Apple’s latest and greatest along with App-V 5 offers a better virtualisation experience.

If you’ve been following along so far you’ll have read my follow up coverage of my (and co-host, Jonathan Eyton-Williams) Geek Speak talk at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, with Hands off my gold image – Automating Citrix XenApp/PVS Image Creation and Hands off my gold image – Microsoft Deployment Toolkit details. In this article I’ll cover the task sequence that deploys Windows Server, installs XenApp and captures the image into PVS.

App-V 5.0 is PowerShell driven, which means opportunity for automating and scripting tasks that might have to be completed manually or might have been a challenge to script previously.

You’ll then have tackled with the product matrix that comes as a PDF instead of something more reasonable like, say, a spread sheet. There’s probably a good reason for this document to be a PDF, but it’s not the best format for reading this type of information.