This is great news, as it will really help to bring Application Virtualisation to the masses, and hopefully other vendors will follow Microsoft’s lead.

To re-state my previous thoughts,I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the concept of having Configuration Manager subscribe to vendor application streams, and re-deliver the apps to enterprise desktops using App-V.

On-premise re-packing and software update release might become as easy as Microsoft Updates has in recent years.  Hopefully!

They’re calling it “click-to-run”, and basically it uses Microsoft’s application virtualisation technology to run the application virtualised on the user’s desktop. The application is delivered over the internet, straight from Microsoft as a “stream”. I imagine that would mean, like with App-V, the application can start quickly with only a core download. The rest of the application can then be trickled down, or downloaded on demand as more features of the applications are used.

I assume that patches and updates would also automatically be downloaded when the application is run next – in a quick and easy way.  And I also assume that Microsoft would be able to revoke or remove the software when the client checks-in. This would open the door to subscription based software purchasing, delivered straight from Microsoft, but run on your own computer (so not to be confused with software as a service – although it does overlap somewhat).

Very interesting stuff, and I’m sure it is a taste of one of Microsoft’s new future software delivery mechanisms.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the concept of having Configuration Manager subscribe to vendor application streams, and re-deliver the apps to enterprise desktops using App-V.

On-premise re-packing and software update release might become as easy as Microsoft Updates has in recent years. Lets hope.

However,  giving users a whole virtual desktop so they can run a couple of extra applications remotely isn’t always desirable. Sometimes it would be ideal to publish an application that is installed on a virtual desktop to a user, so they can run that application without also presenting them a whole desktop. Remember back to when  Citrix introduced seamless published applications – so much of that complexity went away for the user when they could just run the application, without also having to interact with a second desktop session.

Another usage scenario applies to thin terminal users – the users today that do run a whole published desktop from a multi-user server OS. Administrators could provide those users a published application within their published desktop – but instead of running on the server desktop, the application runs from a workstation virtual desktop, and is presented into the user’s server desktop session. This would effectively allow more applications to be provided in the thin client environment, without switching over to a completely virtual desktop environment. In essence, it would allow you to run some server based pulished apps, and some desktop based published apps – whatever was needed and whatever made sense for the administrators.

So, sounds like something that makes sense, right?  Citrix thought so, and have recently announced this new feature (planned for Q3 2009) that allows you to publish applications that are running on virtual desktops. These applications can then be run remotely, just like any other XenApp seemless published application.

Citrix has called the feature VM Hosted Apps, and it will be a great addition to the XenApp suite which will give orgainisations another option for those applications that don’t like running in a multi-user, or server based environment.

Of course Quest has had this capability for a while now with via their vWorkspace product.  In fact Quest has long been promoting a use case for virtual desktops along these lines – using the single user workstation OS to run applications that the terminal servers can’t – but publish the apps through to the terminal server environment where user density is more cost effective.

And I should also mention Microsoft’s RAIL – Remote Applications Integrated Locally. It’s essentially the same concept also, and is used in Windows 7 to publish applications that are running on the “XP Mode” virtual desktop through to the Windows 7 start menu and desktop.

Whichever way you look at it, publishing applications from a variety of machines and OS’s, and running them in a variety of combinations and locations will soon be possible from multiple vendors. More options. More flexibility. More complexity?  The question is, how will we manage and assign apps? But that’s a conversation for another day.