We hope you enjoyed our Application Management webinar last week!  (Don't worry if you missed it. You can watch it now.) We had some great questions come in during the webinar and didn’t have time to answer them all. So if you missed them, here they are:
Question: System Center Updates Publisher (SCUP) can patch only few vendor applications… not all vendor apps?
Answer: SCUP requires vendor catalogs to be published and imported. Although only a handful of vendors (Adobe, HP, Dell and Fujitsu) publish their own catalogs, other organizations publish catalogs that include a lot more vendors and products. In the webinar, we mentioned Patch My PC who publish catalogs for over 100 common products and you can request others to be added.
Question: If 1E Shopping is integrated with CM, will the users still be seeing the apps in Software Centre or is there a 1E Shopping site available for all users to shop
Answer: Users go to the Shopping portal to request applications. They are delivered through CM – when the request is made and approved (if approval is required), Shopping adds the computer into a Collection that already has the selected application deployed to it as Required
Question: Does AppClarity reclamation also work with manual installation or only with packaged software?
Answer: AppClarity can reclaim software regardless of how it was installed. It requires an uninstall command line in order to do that. By default, this will be derived from the Uninstall string in the registry, but if that command line is not a standard MSI command, you will need to either define a custom uninstall command line in AppClarity or tell AppClarity to use an existing Uninstall Program in Configuration Manager.
Question: If an application is deployed per user, is the 'last used' information reported per user or for the last user to use the application on that device? This is particularly important to understand for shared devices
Answer: The Last Used Time property in Recently Used Applications is updated (overwritten) every time the process is executed, so it cannot be used to show per-user usage, only the last time the process was executed on the machine. If you need to understand how various users are using applications on a shared device, you will need to create Software Metering Rules to monitor specific applications. You then get per-user reporting of usage over time.
Question: With 1E Shopping application rental, is the application distribution license terms and conditions considered? (i.e. the application vendor needs to allow for rental in their T's & C's?)
Answer: Different vendors will have different terms on when a license can be reused. For example, some vendors may stipulate that a license cannot be reused within 60 days of being deployed on a different device. Shopping accommodates this by allowing each application to have licenses ‘held’ for a defined period before making them available for other users to request.
Question: Can the application migration task sequence be used in the case of a hardware replacement?
Answer: Yes. In this scenario, you need to create a Computer Association in Configuration Manager that defines the association between the old computer and its new replacement. In the Task Sequence we check for that computer association – if it exists we’ll use the inventory from the old computer along with the migration rules to determine which applications need to be installed on the new replacement computer.
Question: How do you ensure the user gets their rationalized applications on the new PC?
Answer: In the OS Deployment Task Sequence, we process the inventory (what was installed on the old PC) through the rules (the rationalization) to return a resultant list of Packages and Applications that need to be installed. We then use standard Install Package and Install Application Task Sequence steps with Dynamic Package / Application variables to install those applications.