In an effort to secure intellectual property and mitigate reverse engineering in Admin Script Editor, Thinapp was used. This was well before it’s acquisition by VMWare when the product was marketed only to developers. It was prohibitively expensive so I struck a deal with Thinstall to write some white papers about how application virtualization addressed the needs of administrators.

I wrote a technical white paper entitled, Best Practices: How Application Virtualization Improves Manageability and Supports Microsoft Vista and another entitled, Deploying Applications to Locked Down Desktops: How Application Virtualization speeds deployment, reduces support costs, and eliminates regression testing. Because of our arrangement, I was not credited as the author.

Today the benefits of application virtualization are well understood, but when I wrote these it really was a new concept and one that the people at Thinstall were having trouble getting across to Windows Admins.

Here is one of the two papers (the one focused on the topic of its benefits in locked down security environments).