My Digital Life

Back in the day I used to look after big desktop deployments both here at Atkins and a few other places.  Managing large numbers of desktops is always a problem.  There’s no doubt that managed desktops are A Good Thing(TM), but the tools available to do the job were always a bit harsh on either the end users or the IT guys. 

Whilst Group Policy is great, you almost always needed other scripts and tools to get the complete result you wanted.  Whether those were included in the image or applied at logon it didn’t really matter, they were a pain to manage.  Group Policy also completely enforces the settings, there is no way to set the default value, but allow the users to edit the setting if they wished.  Once its set, that’s it for Joe User.

The new Group Policy Preferences functionality allows you to configure mapped drives, deploy files, setup shortcuts, quick launch buttons etc, manage ODBC sources, IE settings, all kinds of stuff.  It can also filter the settings on a per setting basis, no need to have new policies for each filter like GPO.  Plus the range of criteria available for those filters is huge.

There’s too much detail to go into here, but take a look at this screencast over at Technet Edge to see some examples.  It’s good stuff and will take a lot of work out of the more detailed config that enterprise managed desktops require.

There’s a good post over at Vertigo discussing the future of virtualisation in MS.  I started my career doing desktop deployment projects, so the idea of virtual desktops is something I’ve kept an eye on over the years.  It one of those things that has been promising lots for a long time but never really delivered.  I know there are some organisations using virtual desktops successfully, but from what I’ve seen it tends to be for very specific requirements, and as deployment of traditional OS’s has got easier uptake seems to have been quite limited. 

The Calista deal is interesting because the technology has the potential to remove one of the big obstacles to wide scale adoption, the user experience.   Alongside the other technologies in it’s portfolio MS should now be quite well placed to deliver true virtual and streamed desktops.  How about a world where your PC boot’s off the network, a Hyper-V hypervisor is streamed into RAM and then connects to a VM desktop running on a server in an (MS Hosted?) data centre?  Sounds kinda cool to me.