If you’ve ever had any experience implementing Offline Files for Windows laptops, you’re no doubt aware that users are required to manually resolve synchronisation conflicts. Well that’s the impression I’ve always been under until recently – there’s no documentation on TechNet on how to automatically resolve conflicts and certainly no Group Policy controls available either.

There are several methods that you can use to deliver App-V packages in your environment – you could even combine the methods depending on your requirements. I will summarise the methods here and give you some links to existing Microsoft articles and white papers and some excellent blog posts that discuss these options in detail:

As you should hopefully know by now App-V is not a compatibility solution, which means that you can’t use App-V to run applications that aren’t compatible with a specific version of Windows, you’ll need to use other means to do that.

Before you even attempt your first sequence with App-V, I strongly recommend reading the Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 Sequencing Guide. This document lays the ground work for creating a successful sequencing environment and describes the best practices you should follow when sequencing. An older knowledgebase article exists, but it is still worth referencing: Best practices to use for sequencing in Microsoft SoftGrid.

Stand-alone mode in App-V is useful where you are deploying App-V applications via Group Policy or a 3rd party ESD (using the MSI file), or you have the App-V packages available on a file share and import them with the SFTMIME command.