1. Desktop App Assure | Key Partner Resources
Microsoft’s application compatibility promise
99% of apps (that worked on Windows 7/8.1 or Office 2010/2013/2016) will work on Windows 10 and Office 365 ProPlus. If you run into any issues, Microsoft will help you fix them at no additional cost!
Customer Ready presentation
Customer Datasheet
Desktop Upgrade Readiness Process
Partner to assist customer with an inventory of applications and group apps based on business need:
Retire
Keep
Modernize
Inventory
Partner Opportunity
Use these resources to help validate compatibility issues
Ready for Windows
Readiness Toolkit for Office
Windows Insider Program for Business
Validate
Partner Opportunity
Desktop App Assure
Submit a request for assistance. FastTrack specialists help remediate compatibility issues and will work with ISVs to get support statements for 3rd party software.
Remediate
MICROSOFT
Step-by-step guide to request on behalf of a customer
Channel 9 Defrag Tools (25 min)
Desktop App Assure episode with Chris Jackson
WinMagic Customer Success Story
Microsoft I Forrester webcast
Why the Benefits of OS Migration Now Outweigh the Risks
FastTrack
Service Description / Eligibility - aka.ms/DesktopAppAssure
Request for Assistance - aka.ms/DesktopAppAssureRequest
Desktop App Assure page on FastTrack
FastTrack FAQ
Desktop App Assure Service Description
FastTrack Specialists provide advisory and remediation guidance to application compatibility issues as you deploy to Windows 10 & Office 365 ProPlus and stay up-to-date with future updates.
Available at no additional cost to eligible customers 150+ seats). Provides assistance to:
Enable apps that work on Windows 7/Office 2010 to also work on Windows 10/Office365 Pro Plus.
Include Office Macros and Add-ins, customer-developed apps and third-party independent software vendor (ISV) apps targeting a supported version of Windows 10 or Office 365 Pro Plus.
Questions
Blogs
Basic but easy to forget tips to remediate Windows apps compat challenges
Application compatibility in the Windows ecosystem
2019 is the year to make the shift to a modern desktop
Microsoft looks to instill app-compatibility confidence in Windows 7 users with Desktop App Assure
Windows Weekly 604
Available worldwide with support of the following languages
English
French
Chinese (simplified)
German
Spanish
Chinese (traditional)
Portuguese (BR)
Italian
Korean
Japanese

2. CUSTOMER EXAMPLES by the Desktop App Assure FastTrack team
PROBLEM
HOW WE HELPED
QUOTE
Customer scenario: 260 employees using a 3rd party SAP plug-in automating app data maintenance.
Issue: The plug-in experienced a launch failure on the Win image.
DAA pinpointed that this launch failure occurs only when the app is installed on a clean Windows 10 image, not after an in-place upgrade.
This was a hint that there was a difference between the app installation packages.
DAA determined that the installer was missing a critical DLL on the customer’s new Windows 10 image.
App issue resolved by copying over the DLLs to the device.
“When we first started talking to the customer, we identified the problem directly while they were still on the phone. The customer then copied the DLLs to their clean image and was immediately unblocked. You can see other easy app troubleshooting tips here.”
Tweety Whitfield / App Assure Manager
Global COSMETIC Company
Issue occurred while showing the VBA form in a Workbook Open event (code execution: “frm.show”).
DAA engineer determined this was likely due to a corruption error when migrating from 32 to 64bit Office.​
Helped customer modify the registry entry “ForceVBALoadFromSource” from 0 to 1 – this set the VBA to compile the code on load. ​
Resolved issue unblocked pilot of enterprise deployment.​
Customer scenario: Upgrade 24k Surface Laptops from Win 7 with Office 2013 to Windows with Office 365 ProPlus.
Issue: During their pilot, they had a problem launching an Excel macro. This unhandled exception error with Excel.exe (17200) impacted a critical function in their HR department.​
“Our customer’s issue with that Excel 32-bit macro was a showstopper. Getting this unblocked quickly made a huge difference for this customer – and it gave them confidence to finish this deployment because they knew they could call us back if they needed anything else.”​
Samaa Ali / App Assure Manager​
Global
TELECOM
Company
Customer scenario: Using internally developed Visual Basic 5 desktop application.
Issue: App worked on Windows 7 with UAC disabled but had runtime errors on Windows 7 & Windows when UAC was enabled while trying to query a table in an Access 2003 database. Customer wanted application to run with UAC enabled and no source code is available. Issue affected 2700 devices where users were unable to select and update table data.
DAA team identified the source of the issue using the WinDbg and ProcMon tools during troubleshooting session.
By comparing working and failing scenarios found that a function called USER32!SetWindowsHookExA causing the failure.
Applied a custom shimmed manifest file, authenticode signed the application and changed installation folder to run the application from a trusted location to resolve the issue. ​
“It was a big challenge to make this application work on Windows with UAC enabled and complexity increased as there was no source code available. The UAC was blocking certain functionality being executed by the application during runtime. Upon finding a solution, I gave a demo to the customer describing the procedure to resolve this issue and customer was delighted.”​
Mark Sadullah / App Assure Engineer
Global
IT Services Consulting