To Get Started
The magic of Option 3 begins with two
components. Here’s what you need to get
started:
Component 1: The MSI Utility for Microsoft
SoftGrid Application Virtualization. The MSI Utility is a tool that wraps up the necessary SoftGrid application bits and puts
them into an .msi file—all the bits, that is,
except the .sft file. This file might be too big
to fit inside an .msi file because it actually
contains the application. We’ll see how to
perform this wrap-up of existing SoftGrid
sequences in just a bit. Then, when you
deploy the .msi application (using any tool
you like), the installation doesn’t actually
install the application. Rather, the .msi installation
is simply directed to fetch the .sft (the
actual application sequence) file and stick it
all in the local SoftGrid cache. (See the sidebar
“Using the Softgrid SMS Connector,” page
50, to see why you must use the MSI utility
instead of the Softgrid SMS Connector.)
Component 2: The updated SoftGrid
Client (at least 4.2.1) running in Offline
mode. Just because you wrap up SoftGrid
sequences as .msi files, and deploy them
using Group Policy (or another method)
doesn’t mean that regular SoftGrid clients
will know what to do when they receive the
.msi package. To be able to run the .msi files
you’ve created with the MSI tool for SoftGrid,
you’ll need to upgrade (or freshly install)
SoftGrid Client (at least 4.2.1) over your client
population for those clients you want to work
in Offline mode.
SoftGrid Client (at least 4.2.1) is available
at support.microsoft.com/kb/941408. A
quick note to save you heartache: Be particularly
careful that you’re downloading at least
the 4.2.1 client (as of press time the latest is
4.2.2.15) and not the 4.2.0 client, which is also
confusingly located on the same Web page. I
spent four or five hours pulling my hair out,
only to find out I downloaded the wrong client.
Also note that the SoftGrid 4.5 beta Client
(not on the same Web page, thankfully) won’t
accept .msi packages created using the MSI
Utility. You must use at least 4.2.1 to perform
the magic. A warning, though: If you upgrade
your older SoftGrid Client to the newer Soft-
Grid Client (at least 4.2.1), the applications
cache is flushed and all packages need to be
redownloaded.
Force the SoftGrid Client to Offline
Mode
For this article, we’ll install SoftGrid Client
4.2.1 into Offline mode manually. To do
so, just run the setup using the msiexec /i command with the MSIDEPLOYMENT=
TRUE flag, like this:
msiexec /i softgrid-wd-setup.msi
MSIDEPLOYMENT=TRUE
Next, set up the SoftGrid client as you normally
would through the standard Wizardbased
installation. However, when you get
to the Desktop Configuration Server screen,
which Figure 1 shows, enter nothing and
click Next. That’s because the client doesn’t
require a connection to any server. Remember,
it will be working offline.
Because you used the special
MSI-DEPLOYMENT=TRUE mode during
installation, the client should put in some
special registry entries that tell it to work in
Offline mode. A quick test you can do after
the client is finished installing is to open up
the client’s registry editor and dive down into
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE Softricity\SoftGrid Client\CurrentVersion Network and look for a subkey called Online.
If Online is present and set to 0, your installation
into Offline mode succeeded.
However, note that one registry option
isn’t automatically set correctly and really
needs to be changed. That subkey is
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE Softricity\SoftGrid Client\CurrentVersion Network and the value is DOTimeoutMinutes.
DOTimeoutMinutes should be a DWORD
set to ffffff (that’s six fs). This setting instructs clients to cache applications offline for 31.9 years, as opposed to the default of 90 days. It
would be pretty inconvenient if on the 91st
day these applications suddenly stopped
working.
Convert the SoftGrid Sequence to
an .MSI Package
Again, the whole point of working in Offline
mode is to be able to run a sequence entirely
in cache, without any maintained connection
to a server. To do this, you use the MSI Utility
to convert your existing
packages and
projects to an .msi
package. You can
find the MSI Utility at
tinyurl.com/2zlpyq.
After you run the
MSI Utility, you simply
point it toward
an existing .osd file
(with the .sft file in
the same directory).
In Figure 2, you can
see how I’ve pointed
the MSI Utility toward
my Adobe Acrobat
Reader project file
and how the output
.msi file is created in
the same directory.
The whole wrapping process takes about two seconds for each
application.
Note that the large .sft file isn’t included
in the new .msi file. The .msi file is simply a
new way to launch the installation. The .sft
file still needs to stick around and be available
at install time. Again, we’re not actually
installing an application on the client; we’re
installing the .msi, which pushes Acrobat
Reader into the local SoftGrid cache.
Continue on Page 3
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