I’ve been testing a new tool developed by Howard over at HRP Consultancy called App-V 5 Connection Group Manager. It’s very handy indeed. There are dozens of scripts out there which do a similar job (keyword – ‘similar’), but most importantly they rely on adding each package to a machine and using Powershell CMDLets to query the package cache and generate the connection group XML file. Considering an example where we may want to connect half a dozen apps (of varying file sizes!), this in itself may take me 20-30 minutes or more to prepare my virtual machine!
Contrast the aforementioned cumbersome approach with this tool, whereby all we have to do is simply point to the .appv file itself (stored on the file system in an unpublished state) and bang….it extracts the relevant DisplayName, PackageId and VersionId’s to add to the connection group. What’s more is that this tool provides a GUI which enables us to order and prioritise our connected packages, specify connection group names and GUIDs whilst providing support for the more recent schema’s VersionId and isOptional attributes.
