Thanks @JordanCClark and @pturmel. The deployment was bothering me as a potential issue, but sounds like a little bit of work to get the NCL deployment right is well worth it in the long run.
I like the batch script. I’m thinking of making an installer that IT can push to all PCs and just leave the link in the start menu, which would be invisible to most (only about 2-5% of systems use ignition apps right now) but its ready and waiting for anyone that needs to launch an app.
I’m doing some testing today with bundling JRE with the launcher and pre-configuring launch.xml to the local sites gateway. I think if I can then deploy that to Program Files with a link in All User Start menu, that will cover me good and these headaches can be over. I would then just need to update many of my email alerts and custom alarms to not give a direct link to the JNLP but instruct the users to use the client launcher.
I think a great path forward for the NCL would be to include a URL handler into the NCL. Then you could do something like ignition://ignitiongateway:80/projects/AwesomeIgnitionProject or ignition://ignitiongateway2:80/designer and the host OS could pass this to the NCL to direct launch appts from web links! Thoughts?