We recently spoke with Brad Anderson, General Manager of the Management and Services Division at Microsoft, to ask him about some of the news that came out of the recent Microsoft Management Summit (MMS 2009). We've posted the second half of this two-part interview below (read part one here.)
Some of the highlights of the second day of MMS included news that the next version of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) would be available soon after the release of Windows 7 this fall, and that System Center Configuration Manager 2007 SP2 would be available sometime this summer. A community technology preview (CTP) of System Center Service Manager will also be available by June or July. Perhaps the most noteworthy MMS announcement was news of the upcoming availability of System Center Online Desktop Manager, which provides IT management capabilities in the form of online services. Microsoft didn't specify an exact release date System Center Online Desktop Manager, but did indicate that it should be available for beta testing by the end of 2009.
Brad Anderson: OK, day two, client, and like I mentioned, it's all about a continuation like I said of last year: user-centric client computing, talking about the updates we're releasing, and talking about the tangible progress on that vision. We'll talk about the key trends in the environment, the key trends really driving how management is changing around things like: you've got a very tech-savvy set of individuals, Gen Y, who are now entering the workforce. These are individuals who have been using PCs since they were able to walk. They have a different set of expectations about how they want to integrate with technology, how they want to be a part of IT, and how they get their work done.
We're seeing things like an explosion of end-user devices. If you go back a decade ago, desktop management was pretty simple. There was a desktop, and there was pretty much a one-to-one mapping of a user to a desktop, it was well connected, it was a relatively easy environment to manage. Now, users want to be put on stuff across all their devices, whether it be a corporate device, a personal device, a kiosk, a PC or laptop at home, they are really demanding that ability to be productive, and that is driving some interesting challenges for IT on how they enable that but at the same timeframe deliver on the things that are key to them, such as security and ensuring that they are compliant.
So what we are going to be talking about will be framed in this way: in order to deliver on this user-centric client computing vision, which is putting the user at the center of everything we do, there are three key areas of innovation. One, you have to have a modern client, and we'll go into detail about what's coming in Windows 7 and how Windows 7 has really been architected to enable this user-centric client computing. We're going to talk about the different ways that you can access applications, and this is where virtualization really comes into play.
We'll talk about hardware virtualization with Virtual PC, application virtualization with App-V, how the Kidaro application from a year ago on a proxy called MED-V is coming into play. How presentation virtualization with Windows Terminal Server and our partnership with Citrix--how all three of these types of virtualization are going to be used to enable user-centric client computing, and then we'll talk specifically about VDI. If you think about VDI, it's a combination of the three. How we give a consistent way of managing your physical and your virtual access through System Center Configuration Manager, and how that becomes the unifying point where all three of these kinds of virtualization can be accessed in the same way, and users given access to the application in the best way across that.
We're going to be demonstrating some new capabilities in Windows 7, and we're going to show some of the integration work we've done in System Center Configuration Manager, specifically Service Pack 2 which will ship within 90 days of Windows 7 shipping. And Service Pack 2 is where we'll have the compatibility support for Windows 7. And actually what we're going to do here is show how efficiently we can now migrate a PC from XP or Vista to Windows 7 in a very efficient manner. So we do believe we have a premier set of tools that allows organization to migrate and upgrade their environments from one version of Windows to another, we're actually going to give a demonstration where we update 20 laptops in the audience across wireless in just a matter of minutes.
That's going to be a powerful demo, whereas in the past, we've staged where we've had a wall of PCs, at the push of the button we updated those, but now we're going to have these laptops out in the audience sitting on wireless. And we're going to update them, including preserving the 4GB of user saved data that each one of those laptops has. And to give you an idea, it takes 19 minutes to upgrade all of those. It's very efficient.