Few questions about Appsync with network shared apps.
I have 5 Windows XP systems all setup to run the thinapp (Office 2007 Std) from the network share. In the package.ini I set the thinapp to check for an update everytime it is launched, not sure if the this is best, just set it there so I could control when the update started. I created a new build of my thinapp with some changes including enabling Powerpoint, which was not originally enabled. I then pushed the new build to the directory specified in AppSyncURL in the package.ini and then ran the thinapp from one of the 5 systems. I watched the thinapp get updated (via new file creation in the directory) but it seemed to stop once the new files were copied over, I assumed this was because other clients were running from the same thinapp, so I closed the thinapp on all 5 systems and reopened it on just one, after a few minutes the update was complete, including the enabling of PowerPoint. When I ran the thinapp on the other systems all the new changes showed up except for PowerPoint being enabled. I assume this is because the thinreg portion of the update was only ran on the inital system that kicked off the update. Is my thinking correct? Would the best way to solve this issue, setup something in a login script or GPO to rerun thinreg as needed?
Next part of outo push to use thinapp was to save space, we plan to use it along with VDI golden images to hopfully have a reduced SAN foot print as we migrate our general users from physical machines to VM's. We currently do not have a policy that forces users to log off at night, normally when deploying updates of traditional apps a message is sent out by the app team telling everyone to make sure and log off. While we could still do this in the future with thinapp I was hoping for updates to be more transparent to the user. But based on the above test it looks like updates will not be fully applied to a package until all users are out of this.
While this make logical sence I just want to make sure I am not missing anything, is there a better way to update shared apps? Or am I better off just installing them locally to the machine, possilbly as part of the a golden image.