Ericom Delivers Free Desktop Virtualization (VDI) Solution

Last week Ericom announced the availability of a free version of PowerTerm WebConnect for Desktop Virtualization (VDI) on top of the Oracle VM virtualization platform. Since Oracle VM is itself a free offering, the combined solution enables you to implement Desktop Virtualization in your production environment without paying any license fees for either of these products. This is a great way to get your feet wet in what is shaping up to be the hottest trend in IT for years to come. In upcoming blog posts I will provide more information about this exciting new offering from Ericom and Oracle. In the interim you can watch this three minute video which provides a quick introduction and demonstration of the combined Oracle / Ericom solution. To learn more and download Ericom’s free offering click here.

DABCC-TV Featuring RTO Software

If you’re involved in IT in general, and in virtualization in particular, then Doug Brown’s excellent DABCC-TV video podcast is a must-see. DABCC-TV is a video show geared around virtualization and Server-Based Computing news and support, providing "how to" videos, detailed video interviews and product demonstrations pertaining to technologies such as VMware, Microsoft, SoftGrid, Citrix, performance management, and application deployment. In the latest three episodes of his show Doug Brown interviews Kevin Goodman, CEO and Founder of RTO Software. This is a real treat because Kevin has a wonderful knack for describing technology in a way that is understandable, engaging and fun.

In these videos Doug and Kevin discuss and demo three products from RTO Software:

1. RTO Discover - deep discovery of applications, network devices, servers and clients in your IT infrastructure by tracking application dependencies, application inventory, configuration changes and licensing information
2. RTO PinPoint - real-time performance and critical-path monitoring, root-cause analysis and end-to-end visibility of applications
3. RTO TScale - Terminal Services optimization solution that increases the scalability, reliability and performance of applications through application shaping and resource optimization

I would like to mention that Ericom Software and RTO have a strategic relationship by which these RTO products are bundled with Ericom’s PowerTerm WebConnect. Specifically, RTO TScale is bundled with our PowerTerm WebConnect RemoteView product, and all three products, TScale, PinPoint and Discover, are bundled with PowerTerm WebConnect Enterprise. This bundling means that when you purchase PowerTerm WebConnect you get these RTO products at no extra charge. This is yet another great reason to try out PowerTerm WebConnect today.

Untruths about UAC

If you follow my blog you may have read several posts that I've written about Vista's User Account Control (UAC). In these posts I expressed several criticisms of UAC, but overall my approach has been positive. UAC isn't perfect and it’s annoying (by design), but it is certainly a step in the right direction. Moreover, I think that Microsoft should be given credit for its willingness to take some significant punches for the sake of improved security (I believe that they expected to get clobbered, just not the extent of the clobbering).

UAC doesn’t only annoy end-users, it can also aggravate software developers. This is because things that used to be easy under previous versions of Windows can be much more difficult when UAC is enabled. The reason for this is simple: when using previous versions of Windows workstations you could often code your applications with the assumption that they will run with administrative privileges and will be able to do whatever they wanted. The problem was that malware developers could make the same assumption. With UAC this is no longer the case - applications do not have administrative privileges unless an administrator specifically and expressly gives it to them.

We at Ericom had to invest significant resources in order to properly support UAC, resources that we could have utilized to implement additional features and functionality. And yet, at the end of the process, we discovered that in many cases implementing the changes required by UAC made our products more robust and secure.

This is why I’m extremely annoyed by the misleading and inflammatory article written by the developers at NeoSmart Technologies. Basically they are complaining because UAC forced them to implement the correct architecture they should have utilized from the get-go! Separating their application into a UI component that doesn’t require administrative privileges and a service that performs the restricted operations is simply proper design. One can only hope that they've implemented appropriate security mechanisms in the communication protocol between these two components, but given the tone of the article I'm highly doubtful.

Unfortunately this has been picked up by Slashdot, which is only too happy to promote the supposed victory of the "heroic" free software developers over "evil" Microsoft. What drivel ...

Windows Server 2008 Step-by-Step Guides

Microsoft have released several step-by-step guides for Windows Server 2008. These guides are intended to help IT Professionals learn about and evaluate Windows Server 2008. Several of these guides address Terminal Services functionality on that platform:

• Windows Server 2008 TS Licensing Step-By-Step Guide
• Windows Server 2008 TS Gateway Server Step-By-Step Setup Guide
• Step-by-Step Guide for Configuring Network Load Balancing with Terminal Services
• Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services RemoteApp Step-by-Step Guide
• Windows Server 2008 TS Session Broker Load Balancing Step-By-Step Guide

Are You Annoyed By Vista UAC? It’s By Design

Last year I wrote a post about why Vista UAC is a Good Thing, but also that because of its intrusive approach many users will turn it off. In that post I wrote:

The problem is that any security measure is only worthwhile if it is actually used. And such measures only get used if they are not too much of a pain. How useful would car safety-belts be if they were so tight that nobody could buckle up and still be able to breath? UAC is sort of like that over-tight safety-belt.

A recent report on Ars Technica from the RSA 2008 confab in San Francisco indicates that Microsoft made this safety-belt too tight by design. At that conference Microsoft's David Cross said: "The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I'm serious,". The idea was, apparently, that these annoyed users would put pressure on software vendors (ISVs) to fix their products so that they would run properly in more restricted environments.

While this is the first time I’ve seen Microsoft publicly admit this design goal, it does not surprise me. In fact, I had written about this three months ago in a comment on the excellent 4SYSOPS website (a site dedicated to Windows administrators). Michael Pietroforte who runs 4SYSOPS responded to my comment, and his response is indicative of the problem with Microsoft’s approach. Michael wrote:

Dan, I think you are right. Maybe the strategy to get on the nerves of users in order to educate developers was not really a good one.

Microsoft on Ericom

Joshua Schnoll, senior product manager for Terminal Services at Microsoft speaks about Microsoft’s relationship with Ericom. Here is a snippet from this 2 minute audio recording: “We have been working very closely with Ericom around the release of Windows Server 2008 …”.

Thank You

My first Microsoft TechNet Webcast, “Extending Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services with Ericom's Free PowerTerm WebConnect Add-On”, is now behind me and I wanted to thank several people who helped making it successful. First, I would like to thank Joshua Schnoll from Microsoft for being an excellent co-presenter. I also want to thank Michael Shetrit from Ericom for helping me prepare and run the interactive demo. I want to thank Heather Canepa from Microsoft for helping with the technical details. And most of all I would like to thank all of you who viewed the webcast.

If you missed the Webcast you can view it online or download a copy from the Microsoft TechNet website.