Technical @ Updates

Earlier, we have discussed on how to Setup and Configure the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 and Creating the Data Collection Package to start analyzing the Applications. In this article, we will look at how to analyze this report,  and how important is to rationalize and priorotize the applications. We will also look at how to get hints and support from the Community on solving the AppCompat Issues.

Step 1: Once the data is collected, the Report of applications would look like this. As mentioned earlier, ACT has an active Community/Microsoft relations which checks and monitors all the applications and provide you ready suggestions to ease the AppCompat Process. For which you will need to Send/Recieve the Reports. Click on the button as shown below.

Once you hit the Send and Recieve button, you will be prompted with a confirmation message, which would list all the information which you will be sharing with the Microsoft Team.  You can have a look through it and then confirm. You can also review the data before sending. If you have an in-house application, and you do not want to share that report with Microsoft, you can also do that.  (The instructions are given in the later part of this article) 

Step 2: Once when you hit the Send Button, the Report Data Exchange will start and you will see the report now with all the community/Vendor assesments. (as shown below)

This report will give you information on all the applications which were gathered during the Data Collection Phase.  After the data exchange, you will find all the information on Community/Vendor Assesments, Issue reports, Mitigation tips etc.. You also have options to Prioritize issues and apps.

Step 3: Lets sort this report upon the active issues now. I see that, there is an application(System Center Configuration Agent) which has 2 active issues.

Step 4: You can rationalize application and set the priority on the same.  Right-Click on the My Assesment Tab, you will see the below options.

You can set these below Priorities for this application. (As the name suggests). For eg: If this application is business critical for you, you can priorotize the same, so that the Application Compatibility team knows this and they take the action first on this!

You also have options to categorize the application as, whether is it an in-house, Microsoft or even a Third Party Application. This would be very useful to contact the support / Technical Account Manager to check with the compatible version software. 

You can also set the deployment Status in the report for periodic updates and references.

As I had mentioned earlier, you can control the reports before being shared with Microsoft / Community. For eg: If you have a confidential in-house application and you do not want to share the information about that particular software with Microsoft you can opt to do that.

Step 5: Now lets see some detailed instructions on what that active issue is all about. Double click on the application row. It will open another dialog, which provides you information on the Assesment, Issues, Application Attributes, the computer from which this application was fetched.  

Step 6: Goto the Issues tab. This will list the 2 issues which was found. Double click one of them. This will give you information on the Priority, Severity, Symptoms and causes as well. This will give enough hints on how to fix the issue / work with this application.

If you know or come across a solution, you can add your description and method to mitigate an issue.  Goto Actions – Add Solution. Similarly, you can also file a new issue and ask the community for answers and opinions.

 Step 7: Once you complete the work on it, you can also set the Assesment State for that particular application. Right click on the My Assesment Area, select “Set Assesment”.

Following this process, you can identify all the issues and rationalize the applications as per your organization/personal need.

Earlier, we have discussed on how to Setup, Install and Configure the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 on a machine to start the AppCompat process. If you have not read it, I would recommend if you can have a glance through this article first.

In this article, we will look at how to Create and Deploy a Data Collection Package (DCP) to gather inventory for software, hardware, and device assets.

Step 1: Launch the Application Compatibility Manager, from the Start Menu (Right click and Run as Administrator)

If you see the below dialog, you have configured the ACM correctly, If you see a wizard, then you need to follow these steps before you can continue.

Step 2: By default, this window lands up in Collect Option. Goto File Menu, Create New Data Collection Package. Once you do this, you will get the below dialog.

Step 3: Name your DCP. For the ease of remembering, I have named this DCP as“DataCollector_May2010″.  Now you have lots of options here to choose from. The DCP also has an ability to identify Windows Updates. You can choose that, if you want to assess the updates. One of the important point about the DCP is Scheduling.

The Application Compatibility Manager provides you with various options, to schedule the execution of the DCP. You can choose whether, this Data Collection should start immediately as soon as the package is installed.. or even Schedule it. For eg: If you are trying to collect the data from a site in different region, it makes sense to start the data collection at their working hours. So you can schedule it that way!

Step 4: This is another important step, where you will mention the duration the Data Collection should happen. This is the period where the ACT Data Collection Service will be running in the machine. As you see in the below image, you can choose Days, hours or even minutes.

Step 5: Now save the Data Collection Package. This will create an msi file, which you can use it to trigger the Data Collection Service. In an individual machine, you can just double click and trigger the msi. In an enterprise environment, you can even deploy this msi using any of your deployment Tools.

On invoking this package (DataCollector_May2010.msi), you will see that the ACT Data Collector Service is started.

This service will run for the duration, you had set earlier. (Step 4). This service will monitor all the changes and applications in your computer during this period. After this duration, you will see that this service will now be stopped and removed (see below image). (For demo purpose – i had kept it as 3 minutes)

Step 5: Once this service Stops, you can launch the Application Compatibility Manager again, and goto the Analyze Tab. Here you will see the report which were collected.

Now when you click on the Applications (left side) under the Windows 7, you will get to see a list of all the applications which were gathered.

If you are on a good bandwidth or you prefer to see this as a Video, Check the same below.

This completes the Data Collection Process. In the next article, we will look at how to Analyze this report and work on it to mitigate applications.