In listening to some people you would be forgiven for thinking that corporations are dumping last year’s PCs in the trash in their rush to make room for a future built of smartphones, tablets, and flying cars. It’s a wonderful notion and one clearly resonates with many IT pundits who’ve anointed this dream with the grandiose name “The post-PC Era”.
The justification for this perspective is easy to see.
A pair of Microsoft hotfixes for Windows 7 (KB2482017 and KB2467023) that were released on Tuesday had the unfortunate consequence of causing the VMware View client for Windows 7 to fail. Effectively locking out every VMware View customer that was using a Windows 7 endpoint with Windows Update set to automatically apply all new patches.
Hiding in the middle of the golden opportunity that is desktop virtualization lies a dirty little secret.
Desktop virtualization is widely touted as being an ideal solution to the problem off migrating enterprise desktops from Windows XP to 2011 being “The year of desktop virtualization”. Unfortunately for many enterprise organizations no matter how attractive desktop virtualization is as a means of deploying Windows 7 , there’s no getting away from the fact that for many enterprise IT organizations Windows XP remains hanging albatross-like around their necks.
In my series on the challenges and opportunities inherent in Context Aware Computing, I showed how the Wireless Abstraction Library (WALL) markup language when used in conjunction with the Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL) database can build web apps that will work on almost any mobile device. The combination of the WURFL and WALL create a powerful tool for the building new mobile-ready applications, but the approach while ingenious is far from perfect.
WebConnect 5.7, or Ericom PowerTerm WebConnect 5.7.1 to give it its full title, is Ericom’s combined desktop virtualization and presentation virtualization platform. WebConnect 5.7 may be a point release as far as its platform numbering system is concerned but given the number of new features that Ericom has crammed in, it feels like a major release. WebConnect 6 would have been a better choice; certainly justifiable as far as features go, and giving it a marketing link to Citrix’s XenApp 6.
This week’s Context Aware Computing post takes a look at what might be done to make Windows applications more context aware. It also give me the opportunity to introduce my first guest blogger; Citrix’s Orestes Melgarejo. Orestes is Sr. Director of Product Management in the XenApp Product Group, and leads product management activities around XenApp and Mobile Receivers.
Citrix has been all about application and desktop “centralization” since the very beginning. The simple idea was to reduce the number of touch points that administrators had to go to for install and update/maintenance of user desktops and apps. Rather than manage hundreds or thousands of dispersed endpoints, the IT staff could manage a relatively smaller number of centralized servers. Those servers, of course, run a Windows operating system, which in turn serve up Windows desktops and applications to the end-users connecting from their various devices.
The BrightTalk Next Generation Desktop Summit
VDI implementation makes a lot of sense for many organizations wanting to provide a secure and standard desktop for employees. But compared to other virtualization technologies, few organizations are deploying it. Why? Join this panel as they discuss this question, what VDI is lacking and what needs to happen in order for businesses to adopt it.
The Big BYOD Debate
Smartphones and tablets remain ever-prevalent, and the trend of employees using these devices for business purposes, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned, is on the rise. So Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, and the way enterprise IT departments should handle them, is a topic that generates a lot of discussion and controversy. 
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Cisco Desktop Transformation
