Sometimes it is easier to answer a question of what can be done with a response of what cannot be done. This is the case for the age old question, “Can application [fill in the blank] be virtualized with SoftGrid?” With hundreds of thousands of applications out there (millions if you consider home-grown applications), that is a very hard question to answer. Luckily, the SoftGrid Team Blog has posted an article detailing the kinds of applications that cannot be virtualized with SoftGrid. Among these are:

1. Applications that install and rely on a system-level driver, i.e. an application that installs a print driver or a USB device driver. Some applications may allow for the drivers to be installed independent of the other components of the application. As a work around for this scenario, the driver portion of this application could be installed locally on the client system, allowing the other components of the application to be virtualized.

2. Applications that install boot-time services.

3. Applications that use COM+.

4. MAPI virtualization. For information on SoftGrid and Microsoft Office, see the following article:

939796 Prescriptive guidance for sequencing 2007 Office programs in Microsoft SoftGrid http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;...939796.

5. COM DLL surrogate virtualization, i.e. DLL’s that run in Dllhost.exe.

6. Applications with licensing enforcement tied to machine, e.g. the license is tied to the system’s MAC address.

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