Understanding your application estate is a crucial step in any virtualisation, operating system upgrade, or similar large-scale IT project. Having detailed data across all apps ensures you understand which applications are suitable for repackaging to a modern format such as AppV, MSIX, MSIX app attach, App Volumes, and Cloudpaging. This lets you prioritise the allocation of resources.
Undertaking this task manually can take months in enterprises and large organisations, but with a tool like Access Capture AppScan, you can complete the process in days. This is because AppScan automates the scanning and analysing of thousands of applications at a time.
However, automating the scanning of your application estate is only one of the automation features of Capture AppScan. The tool also comes with additional APIs that automate additional processes to further free up IT resources, reduce project timescales, improve accuracy, and enhance the user experience.
So, automating the scanning of your software repository is a given with Capture AppScan. Here are three additional automation features you can utilise, either as standalone tools or as part of a larger workflow.
Automation Feature One – App Packaging
Once you know which applications are suitable for the modern format you need, the logical next step is to package them up. Take, for example, a project where you want to create MSIX format packages. This is a hugely resource-intensive and repetitive process when completed manually, particularly for those apps that have already been identified as compatible during the app scanning phase of your project.
Instead of packaging apps manually, you can utilise Capture’s Packaging API. It will use the input information gathered by AppScan to automatically create MSIX packages for thousands of apps in a fraction of the time it would take to complete this process manually.
The above scenario applies to any application package format that Capture supports.
Automation Feature Two – App Package Publishing
App package publishing is another crucial step that is not only essential for many large IT projects, but also time-consuming, resource-intensive, repetitive, and open to human error. Therefore, it is an ideal candidate for automation.
All you need is Capture’s Publishing API. In this example, we’ll use a project that involves the App Volumes packaging format.
AppScan first identifies the apps suitable for App Volumes package creation. The Packaging API then creates the App Volumes package. Capture’s Publishing API can also automatically create the application publishing objects in App Volumes Manager.
This can be repeated across thousands of applications at a time, and, like Capture’s other APIs, it is a process that is available for all supported packaging formats.
Automation Feature Three – Application Testing
From launch-and-load testing to user acceptance testing (UAT), testing is essential for the success of any large IT project. This includes those that involve packaging and publishing apps in a modern format.
Laborious doesn’t even come close to describing what it is like to manually test thousands of apps. You don’t need to test app packages manually, however, when you use Capture’s Testing API. For this automation feature, we’ll use the AppV packaging format for the example.
So, the process starts with AppScan identifying the apps that are suitable for AppV package creation. The Packaging API then creates the packages, before the Publishing API publishes the objects in the AppV Management Console and SCCM. Each one of these tasks is automated.
With the Testing API, you can then launch a range of different automated testing processes depending on your requirements. For example, launch and load tests to ensure each icon launches successfully, or UAT in a functional environment that enables the app/s to be tested by users.
The Power of Automation When Using Capture AppScan’s Automation APIs
The performance, productivity, and efficiency improvements that are possible with Capture AppScan’s automation APIs can have a hugely positive impact on your project. Let’s look at the last example – automation application testing processes. Capture’s Testing API leads to testing resource savings that can be as high as 95 percent! Those resources that are not needed for time-consuming and repetitive testing processes can be allocated to tasks that are much more value-adding.
How you use the features and APIs that are available with Capture AppScan will depend on your project and requirements. The main message is that large-scale, reliable, and cost-effective automation is possible across large parts of your project.
