How To Manually Configure App-5 SP2 Client

Service packs are usually a collection of hot fixes, and we typically don't see a lot of user interface changes with them. That's not the case with Microsoft's latest App-V 5 SP2.

When you install the client you will find that the UI has totally disappeared. Even the icon that traditionally showed up on the System Tray is gone, and there's nothing on the Start menu. The idea behind this UI change is to make App-V very transparent, and centrally configured and managed using group policy. In my book that is a very welcome step--technology should be as transparent as possible.

But, what if you wanted to manually configure the client for whatever reason? Microsoft has made available the Application Virtualization 5.0 Client UI Application which you can download here.

Once installed you will be able to again get access to a UI for the client, and here is how you can quickly configure it to point to a publishing server in order to enumerate the different App-V 5 application packages that can run.

First things first: Open PowerShell and make sure you have your execution policy set to remote signed by issuing this:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

Second, you want to import the appvclient cmdlets; the command for that is:

import-module appvclient

Third, you want to establish a connection between your App-V client and the publishing server so you will need to use the following command:

Add-AppvPublishingServer –url http://www.yourpublishingserverFQDN:portnumber –name <give the connection a name>

The last step is to synchronize and update the App-V client so that it see the packages that are published. Use this command to do that:

Sync-AppvPublishingServer

If all your commands execute successfully, you will see that the packages you have access to are now available for launch from their configured locations (Desktop, Start Menu, etc.) and you will also find that the client UI Update and Download boxes which were previously unavailable are not lit up and now readily accessible. 

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 01/07/2014 at 3:45 PM