The Dynamic Desktop

This keynote was presented by Brad Anderson who is one of Microsoft's general managers. He led into by talking about how the baby boomers are retiring and that by 2012, 30% of the workforce will be made up of Gen Y. The framing here was all about how Gen Y are tech savvy and will demand more flexible ways of working.

"The Dynamic Desktop provides a consistent experience for users independent of device or location".

Microsoft's belief is that now and in the future we should consider the client, the user not their device and we need to ask ourselves questions along the lines of how do we deliver applications and data to the user.

The next step was a quick demo of Application Virtualisation, so a .pptx was clicked on and Powerpoint was installed in the background in around 10 seconds. Pretty swish! They made an edit and saved it, they were then able to log in from another device and have the same file with the edit via VDI over Terminal Services gateway and so on. This works with the Vista Folder redirection I briefly mentioned in one of my earlier posts.

In Q3 the next version of the MDOP pack will be released and they highlighted that the product at launch was the fastest selling on Volume Licensing they have ever had. As Brian mentioned MDOP is only available via Software Assurance.

System Centre and it's add-ons were highlighted as the best way to provide and manage the dynamic desktop and Microsoft rightly argue that you should be able to use one tool to manage physical/virtual and client devices/servers. They claim to be providing this one stop shop.

Next up was a demonstration of Network Access Protection via Windows 2008, it showed how a device gets quarantined, remediation work is carried out (patch applied for example)and then the device is allowed to connect. The feature will allow you to set policies and do a check before implementation so you can understand the effect of any change. I guess this is much like the Resultant Set of Policy feature in AD GPO's.

Attached Knowledge Services was a good example of some innovative thinking. This is where all the System Centre suite report back to Microsoft (with no identifying info) the health of an environment, its make up and so on. This has then allowed Microsoft to create baselines to allow companies to see how they compare. Furthermore, if you are performing badly in some area you can query the data to find out what to change to help your environment. Taking this further, Microsoft have found that where one customer experiences specific problems, they can use this information to proactively warm others who may be getting to a similar situation, before the problem even arises. Whilst this has a tinge of big brother to it if i were a suspicious mind, the opportunity here is fantastic. This would clearly be a big reputational boost to Microsoft and its services, as well as a stability/reliability boost for its customers. Unless of course you are the customer that has to have the problem first ;-)

Finally, in a bit of a Columbo style "Just one more thing" moment a quick demo was performed using a USB stick to plug into a machine and from there he again managed to show his apps. This is similar to what Mars Office on a Stick is trying to do, but here it would be native to Microsoft. No further details were given but it was a slick show stopper demo.

One slight irritation was that they put up their roadmap of the System Centre suite, all the products are to go to the next version on 2010. Were they our replacement for Zenworks, we could face doing a rollout and a version upgrade as soon as the rollout completes. Having said that, we all know how their deadlines slip!

After this session, I am left feeling quite positive about where Microsoft see the future, they clearly recognise the problems Mars sees and are already looking to address them. It is like they have been stealing from my Client Architecture Framework document though!