The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead has successfully transitioned from Microsoft App-V to FlexApp. Infrastructure specialists Robert Harwood and Bill Hedges share insights into their migration journey, detailing the rationale behind the shift, the implementation process, and the impact on IT operations.
About the organization
As a local authority, the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead provides services to some 154,000 residents and businesses in the region. These services include waste management, social welfare, transportation, education, council tax administration and more. Robert explains, “Everyone using these services interacts with our IT environment, making stability and efficiency crucial. We provide a digital workplace to 1,600 users under the same conditions: the workspace environment must be flexible – supporting both remote and in-office work – but most importantly, it needs to be cost-efficient.”
The council’s workspace environment is predominantly on-premises, with laptops connecting via VPN or RDS. For external users not connected to the on-premises environment, a Cloud Management Gateway is used. For application management, the borough uses both installation with SCCM/Intune and App-V.
Bill notes: “About 47 applications were packaged in App-V, but this was a lengthy process, taking over a year to complete. While most apps were packaged in-house, some were particularly challenging due to their complexity, size and how old they were. Given our modest IT Team, the packaging effort had a significant impact on time and resources. Additionally, we encountered version conflicts because of the isolation of applications.”
With App-V reaching end-of-life, the borough sought a cost-effective alternative. They turned to their long-term partner, Virtual Engine, a UK-based End User Computing and Cloud solution specialist that had been assisting with application packaging and management.
Bill: “It was essential for us to replicate our existing approach as closely as possible, utilizing both Intune and virtualized applications. Given our mix of laptops and RDS environments, we needed a single solution that could support both. Virtual Engine recommended FlexApp, and after a successful trial, things moved quickly.”
The borough quickly recognised the advantages of FlexApp’s granular filtering capabilities. Robert highlights, "FlexApp enables filtering per device, platform, and user group, allowing us to dynamically ‘pick, find, and attach’ applications."
The work began with converting App-V packages into FlexApp. The borough prioritized 14 dynamic applications requiring monthly updates, while other applications will go through a process of rationalisation first. Leveraging Liquidware’s conversion tool, most of the 14 applications were migrated withing a week. By October 2025, when all users are on Windows 11, application delivery will be fully managed through FlexApp.
Robert: Given how long it took to virtualize everything initially, we expected the migration to FlexApp to be time-consuming. However, it was much easier than anticipated. The project progressed at a great pace. With short, focused weekly meetings, we made rapid progress, and within 4 to 6 weeks, we had a working solution ready for deployment. The speed and simplicity of the migration were truly remarkable.”
Due to the historic knowledge of App-V within the borough’s IT team, the migration to FlexApp did not require much additional training. Bill adds, “The meetings were incredibly effective. The Liquidware team was highly engaged and provided hands-on guidance ‘on the job’, which made the transition seamless.”
While this new approach to application management and delivery is still in its early stages, Robert and Bill already see significant efficiency gains. Robert emphasizes: “As a council, efficiency is at the core of everything we do. With such an efficient and swift project, we can secure benefits to the business for our residents, and in the end, that is all we are here for. We no longer need to dedicate time and resources to packaging, repackaging, or troubleshooting. This is a huge win for us.”
Looking ahead, the borough is exploring further cloud adoption. Bill explains, “We’re eager to embrace the cloud—provided it delivers benefits for our residents and supports our legacy applications. While we will gradually transition more workloads to the cloud, our current focus is on optimizing what we have and ensuring maximum efficiency.”
Robert concludes: “For organisations evaluating application management solutions, I highly recommend FlexApp. I was genuinely surprised by how easy it was, given the packaging challenges we’ve faced in the past. Recently, we needed to update a package. We just upgraded it, published it in FlexApp and within 20 minutes it was ‘next-next-finished’ Historically, it would have cost much more time, care and consideration. FlexApp is just easy, intuitive, and it works.”
Want to learn more?
To make the transition as smooth as possible, preserve previous investments, as well as taking future developments into account, Liquidware offers the possibility to convert App-V packages directly to FlexApp. Even if an organisation wants to migrate its digital workspace in the future, FlexApp and associated packages remain usable. FlexApp integrates seamlessly with all leading (physical/virtual/cloud) workstations and solutions such as Intune.
“We started looking at alternatives to App-V and tested several solutions extensively. In the end, we kept running into the same two objections: either the product was very complex, or the compatibility was insufficient. We have two fairly large packaging teams, so we didn’t want a solution that required specialized knowledge. Ease of use was therefore a prerequisite. With FlexApp, we found the simplicity and high level of compatibility that we were looking for.”
Senior Desktop Engineer
Global Insurance Company“To replace the deprecated App-V and to offer applications flexibly across multiple platforms, we had already opted for FlexApp. Now that we’re transitioning from Citrix to the Windows 365 platform, FlexApp once again proves its flexibility, as we can continue using the previously created software packages.”
Wim Hofman
IT Solution Architect Workplace & Security, Gemeente Haarlemmermeer"We did look at app layering from other vendors, but there we saw several limitations. For example, we couldn’t offer applications on-demand, or they all had to be in the Citrix image. That way you get ‘image rot’ and applications start to conflict with each other. With FlexApp, applications are actually delivered as a separate layer and not ‘baked into’ somewhere. Moreover, App-V is going to disappear, and we were looking for a platform-independent alternative.”
Martijn Konings
Senior System and NetworkAdministrator, Waterschap Brabantse Delta©2025 Liquidware Labs, Inc. All rights reserved
