Whilst we are still in the early stages of our VDI deployment, I’m still trying to exercise some control over the rampant randomisation of our application set. One such ad hoc installation is the ten or so users in the company who have bought and installed copies of Adobe Illustrator. A new Polish employee asked her manager for Illustrator, because that’s what she knew. The request filtered up the chain until a helldesk bod was wandering past me with an Adobe CS3 DVD in their hand, about to install it on the user’s VDI machine. Given we are refreshing VMs daily, the user would have ended up with a nasty surprise in the morning.

Given that we have already tried and failed to thinapp Adobe CS3, and that it costs £300 per user, I thought it was time to for a change. I went to the user to find out her real requirements, and actually she was just drawing vector objects on a background map. She would only have used the Adobe Illustrator part of CS3, and even then 1/10th of its functionality. Worth £300? No.

Fortunately, Inkscape 0.46 (http://www.inkscape.org/) almost has feature parity with Illustrator, and is FLOSS. I could give her something that did more than she needed to for £0, and even give to everyone else in the company too. I promised her boss I would look into it, and went off to ThinApp Inkscape. Inkscape and I are friends of old, and I knew it to be a good fit.  I eventually succeded in ThinApping it, and spent five minutes showing her how to use it. I have not heard back from her.

Because it is free, I can now put it in the default application set so that everyone gets it. That gives me the luxury of telling the bosses that those users currently using CS3 should be migrated to Inkscape because that’s what everyone else is using. The company saves money, and I no longer have to solve my CS3 ThinApp problem. I’ve already got GIMP in that way too. Then in six months I can point out the company has already been using FLOSS apps in production for months, and start the real revolution.

Morals for VDI planners:

  1. Don’t accept the application set as it is given to you – question every item
  2. Never be afraid to remove functionality. Choose less, choose smaller, choose cheaper
  3. Always go to the user and find out what they are trying to achieve. If you can show them that your solution achieves it, they won’t have a leg to stand on
  4. You can sneak in applications through the back door and make them the default

Of course, I have the luxury of a practical, supportive and dictatorial boss who believes users should get what we want to give them and lump it. YMMV…