Now that’s flexibility!

Microsoft’s annual TechEd conference was held a few weeks ago and Microsoft was pitching their SoftGrid solution as a means to better manage the desktop. SoftGrid does help customers virtualize desktop applications but flexibility and ease of use is another story in the SoftGrid design.

Current and potential SoftGrid customers are very perturbed about the licensing. Microsoft always has issues surrounding licensing but SoftGrid’s licensing is subscription only based. Beyond the subscription only issue, you can’t purchase SoftGrid as a standalone product but only as part of the MDOP bundle.

You know a solution isn’t being well received when the customers start by complaining about pricing from the “get-go”.

SoftGrid requires a back-end server(s) to support deployment, installations and maintenance of “sequenced” desktop applications. That’s correct!! You need a back-end server to manage your virtualized desktop applications. Plus you need to install a SoftGrid client on every desktop.

With Microsoft, it seems like you always need a back-end server. But even with that entire back-end infrastructure you can’t virtualize an existing application. You first need to “sequence” all applications. Sequencing an application means that you start with a “greenfield” approach. You must re-install the application from start. Now, reinstalling every desktop application in order to virtualize it can’t be fun. And if you can’t find the source to reinstall the application, you’re not going to virtualize that desktop application. Even if you have the source who knows whether “older” desktop applications will install or “sequence” properly.Every time you add new content to the existing application or upgrade it you need to re-sequence A major drawback with Softgrid is that it doesn’t support “contexting”. The sequenced apps can view the context (aka files, folder and registry entries) of the underlying OS but they can’t share context with other apps. Even if they need to. In order to work around this short coming you need to sequence all applications that must share information with each other at the same time. A concept called “suiting”. Microsoft tells many companies to install MS office on the underlying OS and then sequence like applications together. In other words, the most prolific application on the Windows desktop is recommended to remain physically installed on the desktop and not virtualized. Again there are limitations here beyond licensing.

Trigence launched its Windows solution at TechEd. The Trigence AE solution now supports both Windows desktops and server. In fact, the solution for the Windows desktop and the servers are identical.

There is no server back-end or client infrastructure required for the Trigence Solution. It’s “Serverless”. The Trigence solution also supplies a managed approach where it’s easy to integrate with any 3^rd party management tool. Trigence’s management approach can be accomplished through local (GUI or command line), remote (via CIM) or Management API interfaces.

Trigence capsules are easy to deploy since they can be delivered as self-extracting executables. They can even be run on a USB stick. Now that’s flexibility!