My colleagues and I have been hearing a lot about Windows Server 2008 and Terminal Services RemoteApps. Very cool stuff: it’s a great way to publish applications to your users (thin or thick clients) especially if you’re not ready to make a heavy Citrix investment. But, a few of us are refugees from the old…
If application virtualization wasn’t on your IT radar screen with the previous 4.x versions that were Softricity SoftGrid I’d strongly suggest your IT enterprise get a POC (proof of concept) or pilot in place with the most current production version of AppVirt. More on this later – see MDOP near the end of the article….
Special Operations Software has released a tool that combines Group Policy and PowerShell, allowing administrators to push PS scripts to all desktops in their organization. This has a lot of potential to standardize and simplify what we often see out in the marketplace: a Frankensteinian tangle of KiX, VBScript, and Batch scripts running at login and at other times during user startup and shutdown.
Buckle up AppVirt drivers! Microsoft has just released a set of “hands-on labs” for those of us that need to break something before we learn it. Good thing it’s virtual! Books, papers and PDF’s are great but if you’re looking for a way to check out many of the features and concepts through a set…
Things one should know about the new Exchange 2007 service pack with links to everything required to successfully upgrade your Exchange servers.
I attended a Microsoft TS2 event yesterday, and I’m currently preparing a report for my colleagues on what was announced and showcased. As I digest and remember everything from the event, I’ll post things of interest to the community here.
This has been reported widely across the blogosphere, but if you haven’t yet linked this page, and you use Microsoft Deployment, stop what you are doing, and go here now. The MS Deployment dev team has posted a Technical FAQ based on questions they have received via Support calls and email. Lots of amazing tidbits…
Best Practice Alert – did you folks in the app-virtusphere know that Office 2k7 was not initially designed for virtualization? I’m a bit bemused by the SoftGrid Blog team using that phrase “not designed.” I just wonder, with my tin-hat on, waiting for the black helicopters – did MS do this with intention? Will Biff…
A follow-up to my article on Microsoft Deployment: Michael Niehaus, BDD developer and all-around cool guy wrote a “from-the-horses-mouth” history of Microsoft Deployment, for those of you interested in its evolution: A Concise History of Microsoft Deployment
Microsoft recently updated and renamed its Business Desktop Deployment Solution Accelerator and as of a short time ago, Microsoft Deployment 1.0 was born. It’s now available for public download, and this article attempts to describe some of the major feature enhancements since BDD 2007.
While I’ve not finished parsing it, Tarry Singh’s article caught my eye. I don’t normally read all of the links that come in through the ITToolbox newsletter, but anything with “virtualization” in the title tends to give me pause. Tarry’s article provides a (rather dense and obviously knowledgeable) collection of predictions for the future of…
During a client-call yesterday, once again, we heard the “very many challenges” that data centers have with all of the issues that come with the incredible and never-ending demand for application services within enterprises. A solution that’s well-tested and well-vetted for these ever-increasing demands for applications is the propping of virtual infrastrucutres. Nothing new here:…
Doing some research this week, I ran into a website called www.jumpbox.com which is a company that provides server-based software installations using Virtualization technology… Essentially they do all of the hard configuration and settings work, and provide a Virtual snapshot of the application ready for it to be used… They have several open-source server-based applications…
VMWare has recently purchased Thinstall. This puts some heavy muscle behind one of SoftGrid/AppVirt’s competitors. One can only speculate what the San Francisco to Palo Alto move will mean for the product, but personally, I hope they invest heavily in bringing Thinstall’s feature set into parity or dramatic competition with AppVirt.
Doing some research this week, I ran into a website called www.jumpbox.com which is a company that provides server-based software installations using Virtualization technology… Essentially they do all of the hard configuration and settings work, and provide a Virtual snapshot of the application ready for it to be used… They have several open-source server based applications…
By Jorge Pereira and Rob West Originally published as a white paper for Kennedy Consulting on January 2007 Continuation of: A New Vision from Desktop Management Part 1 It’s a fact that Desktop Management has become increasingly complex today as compared to a decade ago. Before the introduction of the Internet and the Local Area…
By Jorge Pereira and Sean Kennedy, Kennedy Consulting Originally published as a white paper for Kennedy Consulting on December 2006 Desktop management has remained largely unchanged over the past few years. Application provisioning and management (delivery, installation, configuration, auditing, and updates) is at the core of the challenges associated with desktop management. In the past,…
Instant Messaging (IM) has quietly crept in behind the corporate firewall as employees responding to different pressures – personal or business – install popular IM clients to chat with colleagues, partners, and customers and even friends and family. Research shows that over 90% of enterprises have IM within the enterprise and employees are responsible for…
Just a small pause to reminisce about the future we are heading into…. During a client-call yesterday we heard the “very many challenges” that data centers have with all of the issues that come with the incredible and never ending demand for application services within enterprises… For a while I have mentioned to a few…
My goal with this article is to give a high-level overview of intranets: what they are, how they are used, and why they are deployed. Intranets are a highly-effective means for inter-departmental communication and collaboration. Challenges associated with intranet design, especially as they are adopted and begin to become part of the bedrock of an…
Most people I talk to want to implement Application Virtualization to improve internal operations. Refreshingly, the conversation has been shifting over the past few weeks to what application virtualization was originally intended to address: Software as a Service and, in particular, how independent software vendors can take advantage of this technology. In order to begin…
Thin is in again – but with a twist… You don’t have to be thin, just clean …. For a bit over 3 years now, I’ve been working on implementing application virtualization and streaming technology within the enterprise… In recent months I’ve noticed more emphasis on this technology that ever before… Products include SoftGrid, AppStream,…
