How to deliver Windows apps to non-Windows devices

In this short demo, I show you how your IT department can deliver apps to any Windows or non-Windows device, including macOS and iOS.

Thanks to AppsAnywhere, university and college IT can simplify how they deliver Windows apps, while making them available on non-Windows operating systems, including macOS, iOS, Android and Chromebooks. 

In this video I launch a Windows app, Notepad++, on a Windows machine (using Cloudpaging), on a MacBook (using Parallels RAS macOS client) and on an iPad (running in a browser using Parallels RAS HTML5 client). And best of all, the user just goes to one place to get the app, whichever device they're using. AppsAnywhere also supports the delivery of apps through Microsoft SCCM, App-V, VMware and Citrix.

By integrating AppsAnywhere with a variety of different software delivery tools (including Cloudpaging and Parallels RAS), Higher Ed IT can improve the student experience by delivering apps on-demand, all from one central app store-like portal, to any device across campus (and off campus, too). AppsAnywhere can also help you to enable student BYOD, too!

Deliver app to Windows and non-Windows devices - Video Transcription

Hello, and welcome. This is Tony Austwick, CEO and founder of AppsAnywhere. And I wanted to record a session about AppsAnywhere and really demonstrate the full capabilities and power of what we've actually produced. I'm often being asked in demonstrations, recently, how we can deliver applications and not just to Windows devices but non-Windows devices like Macs and iPads, et cetera.

Well, this is what AppsAnywhere is all about. It's about delivering any application to any device anywhere and AppsAnywhere is effectively a single pane of glass with integration points to technologies that will allow you to do that. One of the clever things of apps anyway is the ability to contextualize the session of use. So we can determine not just who the user is. Of course, that's pretty straightforward, but we can determine where the user is, we can determine the ownership of the device, whether it's a laptop or desktop. We can determine the geographical location and of course, the operating system that they're on. And based on all of those contexts, you may choose a different way of delivering an application to get the best user experience.

So I thought I'd do a demonstration of that and I'm going to take you through, well, actually, three of those devices. So we'll start off on a Window's device. Here we can pretend from an educational context that this is in a lab or the library. It's a machine owned by the institution. And we think the best way of delivering an application in that context would be using Cloudpaging, an application virtualization app platform Numecent.

Then I'll take you thought on how we do ... and I'll take you through using the same apps. I'll take you then onto a Mac and show you're using Windows application on a Mac and how that works. And then also to finalize it all and to make a complete circle to show we truly have apps anywhere on any device, I'll do exactly the same Windows application running on an iPad. This is all live so it's very dangerous. It's unscripted so forgive any errors. But without further ado, what I'm going to do is log you into AppsAnywhere.

So on the screen, you can see the login page. First and foremost, just so you're aware, this is fully brandable. You have most universities branded if they have the name for the actual service we like to call AppsAnywhere. Often, obviously, on site we will single sign you on using the active directory credentials.

I'm not on a domain so I've got to sign in. And when I sign in, the first thing you're going to see it actually do is validate my session. So as I mentioned before, we obviously know from the credentials who the user is. But what we also need to know is all those different contexts. So if I scroll down, what you'll actually see is we've got all that information at the bottom. I can tell what machine it is. I can tell who owns the machine. That's going to have license implications. I can tell whether it's a laptop or a desktop. You maybe want to target them with different delivery methods. We can look at the geographical location and we can see whether we are onsite or offsite and of course, the operating system. And based on those sets of criteria, these are all the applications that are available to me. Okay?

Just to complete this to show you there are some applications that are unavailable. If I wanted information about why, I just go into more info and it will tell me why that application is not available to me on this session. That could be to do with location, it could be to do with ownership of device. Okay. But enough of AppsAnywhere. Obviously, you can see, again, this is the interface whereby most people may have the logos and color schemes to make it look and feel like a service that the institution is delivering to the students.

The application really doesn't matter but the application I'm going to choose is Notepad, every single time I launch this, this is a Windows application, the Windows version of Notepad. And of course, on a Windows device, when I click launch, you'll see we're going to launch this using Cloudpaging. So Cloudpaging will pop up. We will virtualize the application. And as soon as the application is virtualized, it will run the application. And this is really local on my machine using the power of my machine.

As you can tell, I'm on a windows device so there's no point in giving somebody a remote desktop. They already have the power, they have the capability on that machine to run the application. So in that case, the best way for them to get the application is virtualize direct to the end point, running using the resources of the end point. And as you can see, it's just within the end point. You can see it's running in the Cloudpaging player. And of course, if it's running on the end point, it is in a virtual format using Cloudpaging from Numecent as I said before. You'll see it also appears in the start menu. And I can just launch it from there if I want to as well.

Cool. It's very straightforward, very easy. Cloudpaging is one of the 18 different delivering methods we have so there's plenty to choose from to cater for any kind of used case that you want. What I'm going to do now, though is going to hand over the presentation to a Mac, okay. So I'm going to make them the presenter. Okay. And I'm going to share the screen on the Mac now. So hopefully now, we can all see the Mac screen.

And just like I did before, as you can see AppsAnywhere exactly the same. It's the same page, the same demo site. I'm going to sign in. On a Mac, we have the AppsAnywhere client as well. That is exactly the same validation process. Yeah, so we're going to work out from there exactly. Again, all those exact same things, yeah. So what machine it is. Is it user owned? Is it a laptop or a desktop? And again, the actual location and the operating system.

As you'll see, I've got a lot more applications. I'm the same user, I've got a lot more applications that are not available to me either because the administration have decided they don't want to deliver them to Macs or they're just not available to the Mac at all even through any of the delivery methods.

Okay. So following this through, what I'm going to simply do is launch Notepad. Now Notepad is a Windows application, it's not going to run on a Mac. So how can we do that? There's lots of different technologies that you can use to deliver Windows apps for Mac where the application itself is running on the server. Familiar ones will be Citrix and Vmware. We integrate with those.

But what I'm going to show you today is using Parallels. Parallels effectively runs the application on a server but displays it directly to the Mac without actually having to display the desktop. It's just the application that gets displayed. So what you'll see straight away, very easy is now I have a Windows application running on my Mac, yeah? Perfect. It's all there. It looks and feels like it's running on my Mac. You can quite clearly there see that it is a Windows application and not a Mac application.

Of course, using Parallels with the client on the end point, we can also grant the application access to local resources like printers and the file system, et cetera. So all of that can be controlled and it can be used as if it's a locally installed application, even though it's running on a server. Okay. Very straightforward, very easy.

What you'll notice is the user does not have to change what they do. They log in to the app store, to the university app store, the service that you're provided. And all the complexity of how it's delivering is taken away from they. They don't see the same application listed three or four times with different delivery methods. It's all just one. It's all worked out in the background the best way to deliver this application. And as I just demonstrated, the best way on the Mac is by Parallels native client. Okay.

I'm going to show you this from the perspective of a tablet. And in this example, I'm actually going to use an iPad. And so I'm going to make the iPad the actual presenter. So make presenter, okay. So bear with me, I'm just going to share the screen. Start broadcast, there we go. Okay. Now, we should be seeing my iPad on the screen. Fantastic. That's very clever technology. Okay.

Right, and I'm going to go to Chrome, okay. And again, I'm using exactly the same credentials, exactly the same site. When I sign in now, again, AppsAnywhere is going to work out based on the device that I'm on which application I'm allowed to use. Okay. This is one of the different applications that we can deliver. We have specific delivery methods for iOS and Android where you can directly navigate them to the relevant places from the Google play store of from Apple, App store. Okay.

Well, again, we're going to follow this application through Notepad++, a Windows application. And I'm going to have this running on my iPad. First and foremost, obviously, you can't get a Windows application to run on an iPad. So again, we're using the Parallels method for delivery but I haven't got a client installed for Parallels on my iPad. So I'm actually going to use the HTML5 delivery method which means when I click launch, what it will effectively do is whilst the application is running on the server, it's going to display it within the browser.

I'm using Chrome. Other browsers are available. So you could actually have it running in Safari, Firefox, IE or any of your preferred browsers as long as they support HTML5, it will run in that session. This means you could do exactly the same as I'm showing you now when in an Windows application, Notepad in this instance on a Chrome book. Yeah. So Chrome books with their limited functionality could then be made very really useful by giving them access to Windows applications as well. Okay.

Fantastic. That's all I really wanted to demonstrate to you today. It's really exciting, it's really cool. I think it really demonstrates the power of apps anywhere, how we change the method of delivery based on the different criteria that we collect about a user session. And then what you've done as an administrator is to determine the best most appropriate way to deliver that application to them. Okay. It's extremely powerful and it really does allow you to deliver any app to any device anywhere and this is why we're so passionate about it. Yeah, anyway.

I hope that gets the message across. I hope you're as excited about it as me. If anybody has any question after watching this demonstration, please feel free to get in touch with me. My email address will be displayed. Anybody can email me at any time with any questions and I'll do my best to answer it. Hope you've enjoyed it and I hope you're as excited about it as I am. So anyway, that's really good. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you ever so much for the time. And yeah, cheers. Bye-bye.