Microsoft Enters User Environment Virtualization with UE-V

MDOP, or Microsoft Optimization Pack, is welcoming this Wednesday a new star member dubbed User Experience Virtualization. Microsoft went against the flow and used the term "experience" as opposed to the well-established and popular "environment," which is used industry wide. UE-V will be released in beta first and will be positioned to enhance a desktop virtualization rollouts.

The idea behind UE-V is to establish a centralized location where user preferences and settings are saved and applied on demand to user sessions, whether physical or virtual. This feature is necessary as the ripples of consumerization continue to be felt in the enterprise. As the influx of devices increases, an easy way of applying personal preferences and customized applications settings serves a seamless, consistent user experience.

Microsoft is not without competition in this space. UE-V will find stiff competition with well-established solutions from AppSense, RES Software, Liquidware Labs and others. It will be interesting to learn more about UE-V and see if there will be integration with Microsoft Skydrive, as that will be an interesting proposition considering both AppSense and RES Software now offer Dropbox-like services that are integrated with their user environment virtualization solutions.

I am interested to find out if UE-V will support swapping base operating systems. Will I be able to swap Windows XP for Windows 7 and vice-versa, and maybe tomorrow Windows 8? Or will this solution only address the same operating system? It will truly shine if we can interchange operating systems, as it will also make migration so much easier and painless.

Your thoughts?

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/09/2012 at 12:49 PM