Session 0

Announced today on the Windows Vista Team Blog Microsoft will make available the Desktop Optimization Pack that brings together many of the technologies that Microsoft has acquired recently through companies like Softricity, DesktopStandard and others.  This will be available to Software Assurance Customers using Vista Enterprise Edition. Here are some of the details:

Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance includes:

· Microsoft SoftGrid, an application virtualization and streaming solution that can deliver applications to users in seconds, without being locally installed, on any PC they login to. Virtualization also resolves many application compatibility conflicts because each application can run with the version of a supporting file that it needs.

· Microsoft Asset Inventory Services, which analyzes all programs on employee PCs, reducing the labor and guesswork that often stymies attempts to inventory the applications on the PCs within an organization and turns that into intelligent reports and analysis.

· Microsoft Advanced Group Policy Management, which provides versioning, history, and rollback of Group Policy settings, along with delegation and role based administration.

· Microsoft Diagnostic and Recovery Toolset, designed to help IT departments quickly pinpoint the causes of PC troubles, recover lost data, and reduce future downtime with post-crash analysis.

…read the full post here.

I’m looking forward to digging into these documents and tools.  This looks like a MAJOR step forward in running Windows in enterprise environments.