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thinappnovice
Contributor
Contributor

HELP how to link a thinapp'd application to a system application?

Hi

Can anybody tell me how a thinapp'd application can be used in conjuction with a system application, I have a user who has a thinapp'd version of visio and a system installed version of word, however they are unable to edit the visio embedded image within the word document as it returns an error stating that visio cannot be found

Anyone any ideas of how I can get the system application to 'see and recognise' the thinapp'd application

Thanks

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TiJa
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From my experience with application virtualization: there is no easy way to do this. What you are seeing is precisely what you want to achieve with application virtualization: not contaminating the system with application files such that the application is easier to maintain. Hence, it is logical that system applications can't see the virtualized application, because it is not "really installed" in one form or the other.

That being said, your specific Word/Visio problem is as follows: as far as I have understood, Word and Visio communicate through eachother using COM(+) and its derivates such as OLEv2. In order to let "the system application recognize the virtual application", you would need to link the virtualized COM objects of Visio to the system (for a physically installed application, this basically comes down to creating a bunch of not-to-user-friendly registry keys). That's not possible because the system cannot look inside the ThinApp'ed application and say "hey, I see you have some COM objects stored there".

Therefore, what you need to do is make sure that Word can see the COM registrations of Visio and Visio those of Word. You can only achieve this by running both applications inside the same virtual environment. That can be done in two ways:

- either create a new ThinApp package that contains both Word (or the entire Office suite) and Visio

- use linked applications to merge the Visio virtual environment with the Word virtual environment.

It's possible that there is another approach to this problem (yet I don't immediatelly see one), so I'll glady hear what other people can suggest.

Hope that helps!

Tim

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thinappnovice
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Thanks Tim

I had thought as much but wanted to put the question out there incase anybody else had another approach

Its certainly something to think about as I am sure that we are not the only ones with this issue

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TiJa
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Enthusiast

Perhaps I should emphasize that this is not an issue but rather the intended behaviour (no irony intended).

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thinappnovice
Contributor
Contributor

We thinapp'd both visio and word and linked them together via apps link, however we still have the same error occuring, whenever we open word and try to open/insert a visio image it states that the image cannot be opened as visio is not installed on the machine, even though there is visio. The installed version of visio does open on the machine

thinreg has been used to register both apps

Any thoughts/tips???

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TiJa
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You'll also need to check the isolation mode of the two registries to be sure that they merge properly. If the Word registry is a full isolation mode, it will not recognize the overlapping Visio registry keys. Check out the ThinApp manual on p46 for the literal example of Visio 2007 (with Office 2003). You'll probably want to use WriteCopy as a quick test to see if it works in that scenario.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/thinapp402_manual.pdf

thinappnovice
Contributor
Contributor

we did try this along with a number of other options, when office is thinapp'd as a whole there is no problem but when we thinapp word and visio seperatly and try to get the 2 to interact we are still having a problem; the error message we get is;

The server application, source file, or item cannot be found. Make sure the application is properly installed, and that it has not been deleted, moved, or renamed.

I haved looked this up on technet and on other forums and even downloaded sp2 for vista but it didn't seem to resolve the problem

Anyone had any experience of this or any further ideas

Thanks

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krismcewan
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Enthusiast

Try packaging the visio viewer with Word.

VCP, VTSP4, VSP4, MCSE, MCTS, IBMBCE and anything else I can learn.

A VMware Consultant in Scotland for Taupo Consulting http://www.taupoconsulting.co.uk If you think I'm right or helpful award me some points please
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