Microsoft Application Virtualization improves end user productivity and reduces the risks associated with application management. It transforms applications into virtualized, network-available services that are available on-demand and never installed, minimizing application conflicts and enabling users to work from virtually any location. By deploying and managing Microsoft Office through Microsoft Application Virtualization, you can enable multiple versions of Office to run side-by-side on the same device, accelerate the deployment of Office, and enhance user mobility and business continuity. Microsoft Application Virtualization is an integral component of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, a suite of five dynamic desktop solutions that helps Software Assurance customers reduce application deployment costs, enable delivery of applications as services, and better manage and control enterprise desktop environments. Challenges with Application Management Managing corporate applications, including Microsoft Office, can be very time-consuming. Inherent complications with application compat- ibility and integration, and challenges with updates and mobile user support, can disrupt IT services and delay critical deployments. Because of compatibility issues, IT managers who migrate users to the latest Office version may be unable to run some Office plug-ins or other installed applications designed for earlier versions of Office on the same computer. Since multiple versions of an application may not install or run correctly on the same desktop or server, IT may have problems running applications that are dependent on older versions of Access, Excel or Word on the same device as the new Office release. These complexities not only impact IT resources, they also can hamper end user productivity. Other challenges that may impact end user productivity include downtime when their computers are being updated, and, in the event of a complete hardware system failure, when their applications must be reinstalled on other devices—or their entire systems must be rebuilt. Implementing Microsoft Office through Microsoft Application Virtualization can mitigate these challenges and simplify application management for IT. Microsoft ® Office through Microsoft Application Virtualization Accelerate Office deployments and simplify management Accelerate Office Deployment Using Microsoft Application Virtualization makes enterprise-wide Office deployments—including department-by-department rollouts—easier to manage. Because virtualized applications are never installed on the client computer, and therefore never conflict with the device’s installed applications, you don’t need to perform application-to-application regression testing when you virtualize older versions of Office to ensure other applications will work with it. Similarly, if you install the newest Office release, any virtualized applications you have don’t need to run through application-to- application compatibility testing. This can save you significant time and speed your time-to-production. With Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5, a release available in H2 CY2008, a new feature called Dynamic Suite Composition provides the capability to help simplify deployment and manage- ment of Office and its dependent applications. IT can sequence and manage packages for middleware applications separately from the main application. In essence, Office is treated as the middleware for the virtualized dependent applications. IT only needs to virtualize the Office application once to use it with multiple applications. To make implementation as easy as possible, Software Assurance customers can use the Desktop Deployment Planning Service (DDPS) benefit to plan the deployment of Microsoft Application Virtualization and Office in a virtualized environment. You can also use training vouchers to learn how to deploy Office with Microsoft Application Virtualization. Microsoft Application Virtualization and Office: Advantages