(Classic) How to Publish an Application in My Golden Image if it Doesn’t Show Up in the Start Menu

This article refers to the MyCloudIT Gen 2 platform, which was launched in 2015. Look for MyCloudIT Gen 3 to be launched in early 2021.

Overview

The MyCloudIT portal gives you the ability to publish applications via RemoteApp from our management portal. The only caveat is that the applications listed to publish must show up on the Start Menu. If your application does not publish to the start menu, below is the process to publish a Shortcut to the Start Menu so you can publish your application through our portal.

1. Create a Directory for your Application and put your App in the Directory
2. Create a Shortcut
3. Move it to the Start Menu Directory
4. Refresh the screen in the Portal
5. Select the Application and Save
6. Your Users can See the App

Publish an Application in Your Golden Image

Our Application Publishing tool presents the applications that are listed on the Start Menu. Instead of going through the manual setups of connecting to the management server and modifying RDS directly, you can create a shortcut for your application and put it on the Start Menu. The MyCloudIT management portal will then be able to publish your application for you.

I created a Directory for my Application and named it MyCustomApplication. I then put my custom application in that directory.

For this example, I just copied NotePad into my directory and will use that executable as my example application.

Now I need to create a shortcut to my custom application (Notepad) so I can later publish the Shortcut to the Start Menu. First, I will create the Shortcut in the same directory as my application:

I will now browse to my executable.

Now create a new shortcut for my application.

Now that we have a shortcut in our directory, we just need to move it to the Start Menu directory in Windows so it shows up on the Start Menu. Just copy the short cut into the c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs directory.

Now, the application shows in the Start menu.

And then, when you go back to our portal (and refresh the screen), the application shows up on the list of applications available to be published.

Click on the Manage button and you will be able to select this application to publish.

Once you’ve selected all the applications you wish to publish, be sure to click Save Changes button.

After you’ve completed the application publishing process, and ensured that your user has access to the RemoteApp collection, they should now see the new custom application you published for them on the RDWeb page, and even updated in their Start Menu if you have enabled Start Menu access.

If you have any questions about the deployment process, feel free to email us a line at support@mycloudit.com.