As of 2^nd December 2013 Microsoft has released SP3 for App-V 4.6 and SP2 for App-V 5.0

All the info can be found here: http://blogs.windows.com/windows/b/springboard/archive/2013/12/02/announcing-mdop-2013-r2.aspx

In these releases the major difference are:

• support for Windows 8.1
• Office 2013 virtualization support

Also lots of enhancements were made in the App-V 5.0 SP2 release:

• Support for Windows 8 and 8.1
• Office 2013 virtualization support
• Shell extension support, enriching the user experience
• Sequencing enhancements, simplifying the virtual application creation process.

For all of you who have worked with App-V 5.0 (SP1) the major pain was with application publishing.

Application publishing:

Before SP2, shortcuts in the programs menu and desktop were refreshed after each application that was added by the publishing refresh. This means that if a user would have access to 30 applications and logging on to a freshly provisioned environment (E.g. stateless VDI) shortcuts would be refreshed 30 times, which can in turn cause a lot of flickering and when such a refresh would occur while you are ‘browsing’ your programs menu it would collapse. With SP2 a refresh of newly added shortcuts occurs after each fifth application that was successfully published.

Office 2013 support:

Shell extension support:

By building on App-V 5.0 investments which delivered you the ability to virtualize highly integrated applications, App-V 5.0 SP2 is providing support for a frequently requested extension point into the operating system, shell extensions. For example if you virtualize a compression program or a backup program that integrated with the Windows shell, you will now see the contextual options that these apps have like send to zip or backup to archive. Essentially this enables the virtual application to behave more like if it was installed locally on your device.

Sequencing enhancements:

Powerful and flexible management is a key component of Microsoft’s application virtualization solution, allowing IT to deploy, track and service virtual applications. Continuing the approach, we have made improvements to the sequencer enabling it to automatically detect with the option to include, run time dependencies like MSXML and Visual C++ libraries in the App-V package during the sequencing process.