INV112 - Using a Virtual Microsoft Desktop Alternative

The underlying message of this session was about the stranglehold that Microsoft have on the desktops at the moment, and how it's become less necessary.

Presently, the documents people are creating are tied to Microsoft's Office suite. That, in turn is chained to the Windows operating system, which is linked to the desktop (via OEM or otherwise). A major upgrade of any one of these components usually triggers an upgrade of the others. ie. Wanting to upgrade the office suite usually means upgraded harware, and therefore an OS upgrade too.

At the Office level, the way to decouple this is to use open standards (more on that in a later blog) to store documents, so it becomes irrelevant whether you're using Office or Symphony/OpenOffice. And using Symphony means you're not tied just to Windows as the OS.

To decouple the OS from hardware upgrades, they recommend looking at VDI solutions, as you can maintain the hardware for longer, etc. etc. They showed some Gartner reports and pretty graphs, but they're the same ones we've already seen about trends and TCO of virtual desktops.

The other thing, brought in right at the end, was a move towards Desktop as a Service. Basically, like VDI but with the desktop hosted in the cloud. Nice, but not sure how practical it is for a large company.