GoToMyPC - Access Your PC From Anywhere

May

22

Update: Windows Optimized Desktop for the Enterprise

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

I’m relaying the following article on behalf of my colleague Shanen Boettcher, General Manager of Windows Product Management for the enterprise. 


We’ve been talking with a lot of organizations about what they need most from an optimized desktop experience, and we’ve been making great progress in delivering against those needs. I want to take this opportunity to share details on the Windows Optimized Desktop Scenarios and highlight some news. If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, you will have seen updates on the work we’re doing with the Optimized Desktop. I contributed a blog on this in January for our Virtualization Strategy Day and a second blog about the announcements we had made at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) in Las Vegas in late April. While there are many facets to the Optimized Desktop, the framework is based on technologies that enable decoupling the traditional desktop stack of hardware, operating system, applications, data, settings and user profiles, making desktop management more efficient and easing change and user migration.


This is all based on the core technologies in Windows Vista, Microsoft Optimized Desktop Pack (MDOP) and System Center. With these technologies companies can create a flexible desktop environment - one where users can log on to any managed PC connected to the corporate network and have the same familiar environment and access to applications and data, while enabling IT departments to reduce costs and deliver applications and data services that are compliant with their data security and regulatory requirements.


We are continuing to invest in adding more new tools to this pack. We’ve invested over $400 million in developing and expanding MDOP thus far, and I’m very excited to share with you that we have officially finalized the acquisition of Kidaro Technologies, whose products enable a seamless combination of applications running from within both a host and guest OS. This technology will help enable end users to run applications from multiple versions of Windows at the same time, with seamless windowing and menus, and without the confusion of logging into and seeing multiple virtual machine desktops. The product teams are working closely with our new colleagues from Kidaro to incorporate the desktop virtualization technologies into MDOP in the first half of 2009, under the new product name Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization. We will continue investing here because we know manageability is fundamental to broad corporate use of desktop virtualization.


We’ve sold over 6.5 million licenses of MDOP to date, making it the fastest-selling volume licensing product in Microsoft history. It’s worth noting that 60 percent of IT Pros who are familiar with MDOP have told us they intend to deploy MDOP within the next 12 months. For those organizations that have purchased and are deploying MDOP, we owe you a heartfelt “thank you.” We hope you are as excited about this new technology as we are and are beginning to explore the Kidaro Web site to learn more about what it is and how it can help your organization. For organizations still wondering if MDOP can help reduce costs and provide richer services to your end users, perhaps this new acquisition will encourage you to look again.


We’ve been talking a lot about the benefits of MDOP and other Microsoft virtualization technology, so I want to spend a few minutes talking about how we can address the needs of IT organizations while helping them deliver the flexible and agile client computing required by their business users. I’ve been speaking with a lot of CIOs around the world over the past few months, and there are key trends in client computing that increasingly impact our customers’ client architectures. A company’s ability to address these trends will ultimately define user productivity across the organization:



These are all significant issues many of you are facing today, so we’ve created five Windows Optimized Desktop Scenarios that outline solutions for different types of customers. It’s important to realize that no “one size” desktop fits every user’s needs. These scenarios highlight how you can use OS, application and user state virtualization to deliver very flexible yet manageable environments for your users:



By examining the different user scenarios within your organization, and taking advantage of technologies such as BitLocker Drive Encryption, Folder Redirection, Offline Files, Microsoft Application Virtualization and Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD), you can find the right balance of end-user flexibility and IT management and control. I encourage you to look at these technologies within the context of the Windows Optimized Desktop Scenarios and explore how they can help your organization focus on what’s most important for the business, while nurturing a more flexible and productive IT environment.


We’ve recently refreshed our Windows Vista Enterprise Web site to include up-to-date information on the Windows Optimized Desktop. I encourage you to spend some time there and see how your organization can realize value from these solutions. We look forward to continuing this conversation and helping you realize the benefits of the Optimized Desktop within your organization!


– Shanen

May

22

Windows Live SkyDrive gets comments, favorites, and more!

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

Today you might take notice to a few cool changes in Windows Live SkyDrive. The Windows Live SkyDrive Team has released an update bringing the following new features for our enjoyment:


You can read about today’s release on the Windows Live SkyDrive Team Blog as well!


I went ahead and shot a demo video of today’s new features in Windows Live SkyDrive showing off the capabilities these new features bring to users. Check it out below.



Video: Demo: Windows Live SkyDrive 5-22-08


Windows Live SkyDrive will also become available in 24 new countries today: Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Ukraine, Venezuela, Serbia, Indonesia and Malaysia.

May

21

Look from the top of the Space Needle with Deep Zoom

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

A couple weeks ago, the Deep Zoom Composer Team announced an update to Deep Zoom Composer that was first released at MIX this year. You can download the new version here (version 0.9.0.2).  I decided to use Deep Zoom Composer myself to create my very own Deep Zoom Collections.  

If you recall, I took a roadtrip around the Pacific Northwest with a friend and took quite a bit of photos with a Canon Digital Rebel XTi  (a Certified for Windows Vista camera). I used many of the photos to create some panoramic shots with Windows Live Photo Gallery. Click here to view the shots as well as the post about my trip. However I still had tons of photos left over from the trip. I decided to use some leftover photos taken from the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, WA to create my very first Deep Zoom Collection.


Deep Zoom Collection*: Top of Space Needle in Seattle, WA


* Silverlight 2.0 Beta is required to view Deep Zoom Collections. If you don’t have Silverlight 2.0 installed, it will ask you to install it to view the Deep Zoom Collection.


Creating a Deep Zoom Collection is really easy with Deep Zoom Composer. Almost anyone can create their own Deep Zoom Collection.


All I needed to do was import the photos I wanted to include in the collection into Deep Zoom Composer and compose them onto what is called the “artboard”. I can drag and drop photos I imported from the image selector on the right-hand side onto the artboard and arrange the photos however I want in variety of sizes and alignments. Deep Zoom Composer includes alignment presets (located on the toolbar at the bottom of the artboard).



Once I was done composing my Deep Zoom Collection, I went to the Export tab and exported my project out as a Silverlight Project. In exporting out a project, be sure to export as a collection and not a composition. If you export out as a composition - it flattens your entire arrangement of images into one giant image. Exporting as a collection is like a collection of “compositions” - with each image being a composition. You’ll notice things look better when you export as a collection. I made this mistake the first time.




After the export of my project is finished, I am presented with several options - such as being able to preview my Deep Zoom Collection in a browser.



So how did I get my Deep Zoom Collection onto the web? All I needed to do was FTP all the files within the “DeepZoomOutput_Web”  directory which is under the Project Folder (see above screenshot on how to quickly access your Project Folder) into a directory here on the Windows Vista Team Blog.


Give Deep Zoom Composer a try yourself. I would love to see some of your Deep Zoom Collections. Leave a link in comments. Let me know what you think of mine. I hope to regularly do Deep Zoom Collections here. Special thanks to the Deep Zoom Composer Team for helping me with my first Deep Zoom Collection!

« go back — keep looking »
eXTReMe Tracker