Application Virtualisation & Streaming

I've attended a whole bunch of sessions covering different aspects of this topic, so I'll try to summarise my thoughts now we're done.

Firstly, the App Virtualisation product finally gives the Microsoft management suite proper user-targetting for software distribution, which it has always lacked. The main business benefit of the product is reducing the need for regression testing of different applications (i.e. conflict solver no longer required!). There is a secondary benefit in allowing previously incompatible applications co-exist, thus increasing flexibility/agility. This would be a great solution for COMPASS running Office 2007 alongside previous versions of Office.

The streaming aspect might be useful to deploy to users with limited connectivity, and there is clear potential to use this deployment mode to enable centralisation along with NGN V2. Lots more work to do here but also some big opportunities.

In summary App Virtualisation is something that should definitely be on our roadmap, but it's not going be a solution for everything.