Application Compatibility Training for Microsoft Premier Customers

For about a year before Windows 7 was released (and for a short while after), I spent  lot of time working with ISVs and early adopters to make sure their applications would work when they migrated away from Windows XP.  After that, requests for this kind of assistance died down a bit (partly due to the economic climate, I imagine), but recently I’ve seen quite a bit of renewed interest.

So, I thought I’d post a few things that might be of interest to you if you’re looking at moving to Windows 7 (or indeed Vista or Server 2008).  Two of these are just for our Premier customers, and the other is for everyone.

If you have a Premier contact with Microsoft, then my team (Premier Field Engineering) are able to provide two services to help with AppCompat:

Windows 7 Application Compatibility for Enterprises
This 2-day workshop is designed to assist enterprise customers in identifying and overcoming application compatibility issues that are barriers to the deployment of Windows 7.

Learn to recognize and understand the most common compatibility issues and those issues that present the greatest barriers to deployment of Windows 7. Topics include: User Account Control (UAC), Windows Resource Protection (WRP), Session 0 Isolation, OS and IE8 Versioning problems, and more.

The workshop also introduces ACT 5.6, Standard User Analyzer, LUABuglight, shims and other tools and techniques to help diagnose and begin to resolve most application compatibility issues with Windows 7. You should leave with an understanding of how to choose and use the right tools for different scenarios. You will also get some hands on practice and the resources you will need to start testing your applications right away.

Ready Set 7 for Enterprises
RS7 is a flexible on-site engagement, where an experienced engineer will visit you at your offices and help you test and remediate compatibility problems with your application, using ACT 5.6 and other troubleshooting/debugging tools.

These are both available world-wide, delivered by an engineer from your region.  If you could benefit from either session, speak to your Microsoft Technical Account Manager (TAM) to make arrangements.

Both of these sessions cover a lot of ground.  Too much, in fact, to go into detail on everything.  So, I usually give out a document with an extensive list of further reading.  You can download a copy of this list here:

Application Compatibility Links