The 2008 Microsoft World Partner Conference (WPC) was hosted in Houston, TX on July7-10, 2008, with global participation. The WPC provides an online and in-person forum to learn more about business growth opportunities and product innovation from Microsoft executives.

This year the ECMF team participated at the event and provide a showcase that incorporated the manageability of Intel vPro in a real world scenario that utilized application virtualization and steaming. For the showcase the team used SCCM SP1 R2 beta as an enterprise management console with Microsoft's App-V (Soft grid 4.5 beta) to stream and manage applications to the vPro clients.

This provides the ability to:

• Dynamically deliver application on the world's most manageable clients
• Enable greater business agility with an enhanced end-user experience
• Achieve IT "Green Computing" and reduced TCO objectives via fine-grained update controls.

After the event, I sat down with Craig Pierce to record the demonstration. I think it is a very compelling 4 minutes of video. In the demo he shows both the server console and the client experience, and launches 2 versions of Microsoft Word (2007 & 2003), which share drivers and normally wouldn't be able to run on the same machine. This concept can be extended to many other applications.


Application Virtualization and streaming allows you to no longer go through the entire install process, but simply stream and execute the applications you need when you need them - and the licenses for these applications can then be reclaimed when your not using them. This should become a defacto standard over time, as it works well in all compute models (from the rich client models to thin clients).

Questions? Comments? Funny remarks?

-Jason A. Davidson
p.s. Thank you to Chris Kaneshiro, Sophia Stalliviere, Nicole Trent, and Gunitika Dandona for your help in filming & editing this video.

If you are like me, when you travel, computers break at home - and being a computer person, you are the tech support...your house is most likely your personal lab, in a constant state of flux. If not, I salute you. To make matters worse, I am often the one who messed things up before I leave - luckily, my wife patiently waits for me to get into my hotel and work with her to fix it remotely. She already does a great job at tolerating the wires, keyboards, mice, monitors, and various other computer parts in every corner of our house - so having to wait for me to fix these, is a hassle for her I would like to reduce.

I have a real life scenario from my current trip that is worth sharing with this community. First let me explain a bit about the way I have my house setup. Network wise, I have a standard DSL connection to the house which plugs into a slim & quite desktop that I has 2 network cards on it and runs the http://ipcop.org/ firewall solution, which I have added http://openvpn.net/ onto and use the OpenVPN GUI application on my mobile computer. From the 2^nd^ network connection I serve up my wireless and wired infrastructures and have gigabyte connections to all rooms in the house as well as a great wireless solution, even the printers and TV are networked. I have more than one vPro clients in the house that I have enabled in small business mode. I also have a RAID solution on one of my computers that handles all the file shares - including running various emerging solutions that we talk about on this site (I mentioned I view my home network as a lab, right?).

Now the scenario - while on this trip one of the PC's who is up to date with virus protection and patches developed a virus, and as much as I would like to spend the time looking into how the virus got there - doing this over the phone would not be feasible. Therefore, I did what any modern day geek would do - I VPN'd into my home from my hotel, I took control of the computer over a remote desktop session and started fixing. I found the virus engrained into the system, and to keep my home running until I return, I set the machine to boot to the network instead of the local hard disk using IDE-R (a feature in vPro). Then I rebooted the machine and it booted Ubuntu Linux over my network, and the files that my family uses are accessible over the file shares.

Problem patched - until I return home. Keeping my fingers crossed...

-Jason

p.s. If you have any questions on how to configure your house this way - fire away.

While in Atlanta, I was able to get a few minutes with Brian Duckering from AppStream to have him show us his latest.

Here is the video. (I also learned that I need to do lighting different in this video...novice mistake on my part about having the window in the background - beyond the window is the Atlanta Braves stadium, which would have been a nice backdrop).