Last year we introduced AppsAnywhere – a new way for staff and students to access software applications (apps) on university and privately owned devices.
What is AppsAnywhere?
AppsAnywhere is the University of Stirling’s software streaming service. Software applications like SPSS – a popular statistics package, can be installed and used at work or at home, or anywhere you want with a single click.
Most core software needed for work and study at Stirling is already available on AppsAnywhere. Applications are streamed “on-demand” anywhere they are needed. After you have streamed a piece of software for the first time, your device will remember the app and it will become available in the Start menu of your device. You can pin the app to the Start menu or the taskbar as if the software were installed on your machine and launch it from there going forward. While the behaviour is as if your device has the piece of software installed, it is streaming through an application called Cloudpaging Player which resides on your device.
As well as providing a software delivery service for our personal devices, AppsAnywhere is also going to be our primary way of making software available to staff on university-owned devices and to students in the Computing labs.
Software in the labs.
If you are going to be teaching in a computer lab the way you request software has changed. You will no longer be able to request software to be installed on the PCs, but you can request software is added to AppsAnywhere. Students can then access all the software they need through the AppsAnywhere desktop shortcut on any lab computer.
In a hybrid teaching situation, this means that your remote students will have the same access to the software as those physically in the lab. Important note: AppsAnywhere is primarily for Windows devices. Apple and Chromebook owners can access Windows software by remotely accessing some of our lab computers on campus or by going to AppsAnywhere and changing the OS drop-down to either OS X or Chrome OS to see the software available for those platforms.
The request and setup process for apps to be added to AppsAnywhere is significantly quicker than getting the software installed in individual labs and has the advantage that you are not tied to a particular lab for your teaching.
Most core applications are already available so please log on to AppsAnywhere before filling in the request as you may find that your required software is already there.
Any enquiries about AppsAnywhere can be directed to the Information Centre.
See our AppsAnywhere section on UniDesk for more information. http://stir.ac.uk/412