Sequencing Office 2010 with App-V 5 is quite simple and actually less of a hassle compared to the instructions for the previous version of App-V (4.6). The instruction still requires full attention of the person executing them, but there are less steps to mix-up things with. Most likely – this is due to the new Virtual Extensions in App-V 5 that can more easily integrate any product into the operating system.
There is a known issue list posted by Microsoft that details some topics that are quite interesting and will present a few gotchas to any one deploying this.
And, as always; Read Aaron Parkers whitepaper regarding the virtualization of Office 2010 with App-V. It is a long document, but then again – if you fail to deliver office properly the negative spiral from end-users will drown you in work.
However, its quite a big task to virtualize Office and even with the simplified and more enabled virtual extensions – there are a few gotchas. Like this;
There are two Mail Control Panel applets published with the App-V 5.0 integration kit. The 64-bit version doesn’t work out of the box, most likely because its not supposed to be used at all if you are deploying a 32-bit version of Outlook. I can’t say that the same is true for the 32-bit applet if deploying 64-bit version of Outlook – that you may test on your own.
You can manually correct this by locating the following registry key;
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{005CB1F2-224F-4738-B051-91A96758F50C}\shell\open\command
Set the default value to REG_EXPAND_SZ to;
C:\ProgramData\App-V\CAA7FF95-824E-461C-8DBB-0FCB2431415D\F7ABB870-0634-445A-867A-5AB1D09C7BE5\Root\Client\AppVLP.exe" rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL "C:\ProgramData\App-V\CAA7FF95-824E-461C-8DBB-0FCB2431415D\F7ABB870-0634-445A-867A-5AB1D09C7BE5\Root\Office14\MLCFG32.CPL
Well – actually don’t. The above reference is the specific path to the unique guid of my personal package. Pick up _your_ specific path from the 32-bit key;
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{72F3C31D-95DE-4d79-9979-FB899BB89427}\shell\open\command