Desktop Operating System upgrades and migrations to ensure installed applications are compatible with the new environment. If an environment does not have a lot of locally installed applications and heavily dependent on web applications, cloud applications, and Microsoft App-V, then AppDNA is not going to be beneficial in that organization.
As any other archiving solution, it is very well suited for environments with a large footprint of unstructured data (CIFS / NFS shares for user data) with a large amount of unused/old files and a need to keep those unused files for long term. In our scenario, due to some legal and contractual constraints we need to keep these files for 15 years. Archiving is a good choice to move the unused files to a cheaper storage tier, both on-prem or cloud.
Citrix AppDNA has a user friendly interface for admins to use and the product is updated well by Citrix Support.
It does not take a lot of resources to deploy AppDNA and can be done within a work week even for a large environment.
The reports not only show compatible and incompatible applications, but provide suggested solutions for incompatible applications to resolve and make them compatible with new Operating System.
If you have Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop Platinum, AppDNA is included and no additional cost.
Citrix AppDNA should get more frequent updates on application compatibility list and provide even more detailed suggestions for fixes and perhaps auto-fix feature for some applications.
Compatiblity with legacy Operating Systems could be expanded to include more applications and OS to increase usability.
A good essential tool that should be marketed more by Citrix to organizations for usage beyond Citrix environment. Most non-Citrix IT personnel and management are unaware of the benefits of AppDNA and it's ability to help with desktop Operating System migrations.
AppDNA is more robust and provide a nice report of application compatibility list to review and segment verified applications from problematic applications. It takes one step further from the Microsoft Windows Migration Tool by providing solutions to fix the problematic applications.
We have used Veritas Enterprise Vault in the past, and besides its being a well-known player on the data archiving market, their tool is far more complex to implement, to manage and to keep working. Komprise is very robust and also very easy to implement, as most part of the job is done on Komprise side. The management console is delivered through a public URL as a SaaS platform. You only need to deploy a few VMs for scan/archiving/user access, which they call "Observer VMs." Komprise also doesn't uses Stub files, which is a poor implementation adopted by the competitor for file access. We had a lot of issues in the past with stub files. Komprise has implemented 'bread crumbs', which are CIFS symlinks to the files on the Observer. It is a very good implementation and it works really well.
AppDNA was relatively easy to deploy with a small team of 3-4 support IT personnel and took a week to deploy and another week for us to configure and use.
Great tool to cut down on manual process of testing initial application compatibility before system upgrade.
If you are a Citrix Platinum customer, there is no reason not to use this tool and a great way to consider upgrading to Platinum if you are an Advance or Enterprise customer.
For a single large organization (over 3000 desktops), if you are planning a desktop Operating System upgrade you need to take a look at AppDNA.
