On 13 November 2020, Juriba acquired AppAvail, a leading edge application packaging and testing automation provider, to add automated smoke testing, functional testing, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) as well as automated application packaging and management to its Evergreen IT Management solution, Juriba Dashworks.
Barry Angell, CEO of Juriba, says about the acquisition:
"We are thrilled to welcome AppAvail to the Juriba family! Many of our larger customers struggle to keep pace with the ever-increasing velocity of technological change they have to manage every day! With AppAvail becoming part of Juriba, IT managers are, for example, able to queue in hundreds of apps for automatic testing over the weekend, knowing that on Monday they will have 100 percent coverage without manual intervention, which means they can immediately put the next steps into motion based on smart workflows and automation.
For us, these new automated smoke testing, functional testing, UAT, and application management capabilities were an important puzzle piece that will make Dashworks an even more powerful Evergreen IT Management solution — particularly for Windows 10 Servicing, Office 365 Servicing, and Patch Management Testing. Because of the already significant integration with Dashworks, our customers can accelerate their Windows 10 Servicing and Office ProPlus readiness right away."
The former AppAvail's products, Automated Application Packaging (PKG+), Application Packaging Manager (APM), and Application Compatibility Engine (ACE), are now a part of the expanded Dashworks solution as Juriba Dashworks Application Manager Packaging and Juriba Dashworks Application Manager Smoke Testing. This results in various benefits for Juriba customers, such as:
- Saving a significant amount of time and money on testing of applications,
- Significantly reducing the risk of rolling out a new OS against an application set that doesn't work,
- Increasing rollout velocity as you can now target much more effectively across the deployment rings and the applications we care about,
- Reducing the overhead on the IT department trying to coordinate with application testers and packagers,
- and much more.
Automated Smoke Testing & Functional Testing
The new Juriba Dashworks Application Manager Smoke Testing provides:
- Automated smoke tests (meaning the automated install, launch and uninstall of an app) and
- Functional tests (the automated install, launch of script-based functional test, and uninstall) using a third party test capture toolkit
for all applications, including in-house applications — resulting in 100% coverage of the application estate. These tests can be run against an organization's own image and settings (not against the vanilla build).
In addition, IT managers now have the ability to perform manual user acceptance tests. This ability is important as certain apps, e.g., business-critical applications, might need to be signed off before rollout can commence. This happens complementary to Dashworks where further critical user tests can be performed in the live environment. As a result, you can track the testing results of manually performed tests resulting from rolling out a change to early adopters while automatically performing smoke and functional testing in parallel.
Automated Application Packaging
In addition to application testing, the AppAvail acquisition also brings automated application packaging to Dashworks. Using the new Juriba Dashworks Application Manager Packaging Module, IT managers as well as non-technical application owners can automatically create high-quality MSI and App-V, ((MSIX and .intunewin (the new format for Intune) coming shortly) applications against their own corporate packaging specifications and standards. What used to take hours will now take only minutes and it can all be done with self-service, so no more frustrating back-and-forthing!
After packaging your application, you now can perform an automated quality review to ensure the application will work correctly in the live environment — improving the speed of delivery, reducing the cost of providing these packages, and accelerating your application readiness. This is especially important for big transformation projects, such as Windows migrations, an MDM transformation to move to Intune and therefore a new packaging format, or application virtualization. It will also help to enable the move to Microsoft WVD and MSIX App attach for those organizations looking towards cloud delivered desktops.
In addition, IT managers can manage all the application assets in a centralized repository, utilize smart packaging discovery and workflow, create insightful and actionable dashboards, and much more.
Product Availability
These automated testing and application packaging solutions can be purchased as a standalone solution or as part of the Dashworks suite. It is available as on-premise or in the cloud.
To learn more about the acquisition, the new capabilities, and what this means for you as a customer, prospect, stakeholder, or partner, please join us for our upcoming webinar.
