What’s up, everyone!
So, did you hear about Rimo3 yet? Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about about Rimo3, especially since they have teamed up with Microsoft for integration with Intune and their Nerdio partnership. But what is Rimo3 and what do they do? Let’s take a look in the form a blog series and start with an introduction to Rimo3.
This post is part of the following series | Application Management With Rimo3
On The Path To The Cloud
Let’s say you are on the path to the Microsoft cloud and you are looking to add virtual desktops, Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows 365, to your available endpoints. You probably discovered that there are a lot of things to look at! A very important thing to take a look at is application management. How do you know for certain that your applications will run on your shiny new endpoint? And what are the options to manage your applications?
This might not seem like a big deal for customers with just a couple of applications, but what happens if your customer has a lot of applications. Maybe a 100 apps or… more?
What are the application management strategies here? Here are a couple of possibilities;
- You could migrate the most important traditional apps to a SaaS variant (if available).
- You can package and test the apps on your new endpoint using Microsoft Endpoint Manager.
- You can use a third party solution to simplify the package management and use Endpoint Manager or the third party solution to install and manage the apps.
- You can use automation.
What if your applications where all SaaS variants? You would be able to login using the identity of your own tenant and you could access them via a webbrowser. In this scenario you (most likely) don’t have to install anything locally. Very cool, right? Well the more applications you have, the more this scenario becomes wishful thinking because not every app has a SaaS variant to migrate to. And most support apps, like your Adobe Readers etc still need to be installed locally. But it’s definitely worth to check if there’s a SaaS variant for the most important apps of your organization.
You can choose to package your apps and test the installation on your endpoint. But there’s a downside to this. This could become very time consuming and you have to decide how you are going to package the application. Are you going to use a win32 app or a line-of-business app? Or are you going with the recommended MSIX solution?
Remember the more apps you have, the more time you will need to package, test and maintain the apps.
You could choose to implement a third party solution like Chocolatey (for Business) or Liquit Workspace.
Chocolatey has a public repository that you can use. This way you can save some time if you use packages that are already available to you. You can setup your own Chocolatey server to import the apps and add your own. You can configure your customer package to connect to your private Chocolatey server.
On a sidenote; (not really a third party) It’s worth mentioning the Windows Package Manager if you want to use a Microsoft solution (Winget).
Another great third party is Liquit with their Workspace solution. You can use their Liquit Setup Store to quickly import existing packages of license free apps to your own Workspace. Another advantage is that you can quickly setup and MSP model by linking the customer’s workspace to your own. You could go all out if you want to setup and configure context-awareness for your applications or keep things simple by letting users add their own apps from the Workspace app.
Let me start this part by explaining that I am not an automation expert. There are many others who understand automation way better then I do. But that does not mean that automation is an option which is only available for specialized IT pro’s.
Imagine if you could use an automated process that checks;
- which package format works best for the application
- the compatibility with the OS
- the functionality of the application
- the performance of the application
- has detailed logging
What if you are responsible for a large enterprise with a LOT of applications? Chances are that you are using Config Manager to manage your applications which means you already have a lot of intelligence available for your apps, like how to install perform an unattended installation. How cool would it be to reuse all this information and automatically test the installation on your new virtual endpoint? There are a couple of big wins here;
- You can save a huge amount of time importing apps from config manager
- You get an accurate idea if your apps work on your new virtual endpoints
How Does Rimo3 Work?
You can setup Rimo3 in two ways;
- Stand-alone Deployment
- Azure Linked Deployment
The Azure Linked Deployment has some components running in your own tenant in cooperation with components in the Rimo3 tenant. Here’s a design sheet how there parts work together;
Let’s take a look at each Rimo3 specific component and it’s function;
- Web Host: Present the webpage you can use the manage the environment.
- Database: Stores the information required and gathered by Rimo3.
- Gateway: A VM that has the gateway agent installed. It acts as a reverse proxy to secure communication between task runners and the Web Host as well as orchestrating activities on the task runners.
- Task Runner: A VM that has the task runner agent installed. It carries out automated tests and other Rimo3 activities such as importing application packages, discovery and conversion.
What Are The Key Benefits Of Rimo3?
Rimo3 definitely has a new and exciting way of managing applications for your virtual endpoints. You can use Rimo3 to;
- Automatically onboard applications from SCCM to Microsoft Intune
- Manually onboard applications to Microsoft Intune
- Integration with Nerdio Manager to accelerate migrations
- Have the ability to assess applications using Intelligent Smoke Testing
- Modernize applications
- Package applications to MSIX or other formats
- Retain packaging data (in the form of console data, screenshots and even videos!)
