School District Uses Virtualization to 'Kid-Proof' 10,000 Student PCs

You can read an excerpt of the article here:

The small IT staff of the Kent School District in Kent, Wash., has discovered a way to nearly kid-proof the thousands of notebook PCs it’s phasing in for all grade levels.

The district uses the notebooks simply as a repository for groups of applications that are virtualized using the Microsoft Application Virtualization software (formerly SoftGrid). Each application is packaged with Microsoft’s virtual runtime, stored on a server, and then downloaded to a notebook or desktop PC when a student logs on and clicks the corresponding icon. On a notebook, the package runs in a protective virtual “bubble,” instead of actually being installed on the PC.

That means district IT staff largely avoid the plague of application conflicts, changes, DLL snafus, and all the other software-based problems that are routine for large laptop deployments. Because the PCs share a common, standard Windows XP software image, spares can be stored at every school. If a student’s laptop stops working for any reason, he or she can swap it for a spare, fire it up, download the virtualized application set and get back to work.

Sidestepping the typical hardware and software support burden is critical to the district’s ambitious goal of equipping all students in grades 7-12 with a laptop PC that could be taken home. But to truly realize the notebook’s potential, district officials realized they also had to revamp the curriculum to make use of it, and train and support teachers to exploit both. The expanded laptop program got under way with an extensive pilot in September 2005.

Click to see: Diagram of Kent Schools use of virtualization

Currently there are about 10,000 computers for 27,000 students in 40 buildings spread over 72 square miles just south of Seattle. Of those machines, 3,000 are notebooks, the rest desktops. The district will be adding up to 2,500 notebooks per year until it reaches the target goal of 15,000 for the upper grades, says Thuan Nguyen, the district’s director of information technology. All are currently running Windows XP, but the district will be shifting to Vista in 2009.

Do you want to make a game and don't know where to start? Take a look at the new Popfly Game Creator! It's a new module to create casual games on Silverlight, starting from scratch to the 18 available templates. The system is complete and good enough though it's in a starting phase. Take a look at:

www.popfly.com

More at John Montgomery's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/johnmont/archive/2008/04/30/the-new-popfly-game-creator.aspx

Watch some videos by Adam Nathan, showing how to create a game from scratch. 

Create a new game!

Some games with almost any code

Letter from Steve Balmer to Jerry Wang: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/may08/05-03letter.mspx

The question, what's next?

1. What you need:

a) Your need a Memory Stick Pro Duo formatted by your PSP (with at least 512MB). Some full length movies can take up a lot of memory space so aim to get as much memory as you can afford.

b) Computer or Laptop (An average pc or laptop will do)

c) USB cable, preferably USB 2.0

d) Some MP4 movies or films to put on your PSP device (You can get these from your own DVD collection or you can download from the internet. There are many movie download sites online.)

2. Getting started:

Connect your computer to your PSP using the USB cable and press the 'X' on your PSP. Your computer will recognise the new connection and assign it a new removable drive. If this is the first time you're connecting your pc to your PSP your pc may first install some new drivers to support the connection.

3. Prepare your movies

If you already have the movies on your pc, put them in one folder where you can easily find them. If you don't already have the Mp4 movies you can download them from the internet. Make sure they are all in MP4 format. There are a number of mp4 movie converters that you can find online. Some are free. Go to any search engine and do a search for mp4 movie converters.

4. Copy the movies and put them on your PSP.

On your computer, browse to the removable USB drive corresponding to your PSP and navigate to the PSP folder. Create a folder called 'MP_ROOT' and inside that folder create another folder and name it '100MNV01'. This is the folder where you'll put your mp4 movie files. Now copy the movie files from your computer to the '100MN01' folder on your PSP. The mp4 movie files should be named in the format 'M4V00000.MP4' where 00000 can be any number. For example, M4V00001.MP4 or M4V00012.MP4 are fine but M4VJAMESBOND12.MP4 and MyBestMovie.MP4 are not.

5. Watch the Movies on your PSP

First disconnect your PSP from your computer. Then on your PSP navigate to your 100MNV01 folder and select it to display all the movies that you have copied to your PSP. You can now select and watch any mp4 movie you want on your PSP.

So, one of these I gave a presentation about Softgrid in an MDOP session, and one of the presents asked me the following question:

"So, if we have an Administrator's console to enable the streaming of the applications to the clients, why do we need SCCM 2007 (former SMS)?"

Obviously, I knew that Softgrid would have an integration with SCCM, but I didn't know what kind. But after doing some research, I found that this integration is arriving in the summer of 2008 and has some of the following features:

· Distribution Points are enabled to stream virtual applications to clients

· SCCM clients are configured to interact with the SoftGrid client to evaluate policy

· SCCM administrators use the SCCM Administrator Console to create virtual application packages and send them to distribution points

· SCCM Advertisements are used to deliver applications to clients

Hopefully the amount of features will increase, but after seeing these features, my question is... why are needing now the Softgrid's console if we have SCCM?

A few days ago, I got to know about the preview of a product that hopefully will revolutionize the future of computing: Live Mesh!

Imagine a world where you can access your computers(PCs, Macs…) , cellphones, PDAs, etc. from anywhere you may be. Sharing and syncronizing folders, files and access your desktop and even your applications. So Live Mesh is that and so much more. Some of the things that have been said, is that they include the app's instalation at the same time to all the computers and devices from the web!

Are you interested? Watch it now on:

• Oficial Site: www.mesh.com
• Oficial Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/livemesh
• Screenshots: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/mesh_tp.asp
• Announcing Blogs:
  • http://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2008/04/22/279.aspx,
  • http://blogs.msdn.com/livemesh/archive/2008/04/21/live-mesh-as-a-platform.aspx

As seen here the team from Login Consultants released a new version of their OSD editor and Softgrid Migration Tools to support Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5. There's a brief overview lifted from there website and a download link below.

Login Consultants releases updated versions of the SoftGrid OSD Editor and SoftGrid Migration Tool to support the upcoming version of Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (formerly SoftGrid) which is now still in beta.

New in the SoftGrid OSD Editor 2.1, besides some minor fixes, is the ability to support and manage Dynamic Suiting Composition in OSD files. This is a new feature of SoftGrid 4.5 which allows interaction between different virtualized applications which run in their own “sandboxed” environment. The SoftGrid Migration Tool (SGMT) 1.1 has also been updated to work with SoftGrid 4.5. This version of the SGMT also supports new features of the latest SoftGrid Sequencer version, like the ability to set type of Compression, Block Size and save a Virtual Application in Microsoft Installer (MSI) format.

The SoftGrid OSD Editor 2.1 and the SoftGrid Migration Tool 1.1 can be downloaded through our downloads section.

Microsoft developed a free web application that it allows to define transit routes based on crossing of some information, helping the drivers to run away from the areas with more movement.

The ClearFlow service was developed in the last five years by specialized investigators of Microsoft in artificial intelligence and it is based on the adaptation of techniques of learning for machines. The goal is to use some types of information that can influence flowing of the transit to identify alternative passages. This method allows in such a way to access more necessary routes in highways as in ways in the cities.

The application goes to be available in maps.Live.com vestibule and will cover initially 72 cities of U.S.A. Let's see when it comes to Portugal.

For more information it reads this article of New York Times.

Ok, so let me know which one is the best, or better to buy or a good choice! Help me decide, and I shall reward you!

Give me your thought and experience! Tks!

VS

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