SoftGrid ZeroTouch No Longer Available (for a while...)
When Microsoft announced the purchase of Softricity last year, there was great rejoycing among many Windows administrators. Softricity had worked very closely with Microsoft throughout the development of their product, even going as far as including SMS integrations with the product.
Once the merger was announced, it took a while before you could even buy the product as Microsoft incorporated Softricity into its fold. Now that its available, the Microsoft SoftGrid Team Blog announced last week that the ZeroTouch componentry would not be available for a while, and even when it came available it would do so in a completely different format.
According to their blog post,
So if ZeroTouch did all these cool things why is it no longer available? We all agree that these are all good features to have and that our customers appreciate and value them, but after much consideration and deliberation the decision was made to enhance the offering and better align it with other Microsoft products.
ZeroTouch was the technology that allowed users to request and install their own software through a self-service web site. Great stuff, especially when coupled with SoftGrid. What'll happen at this point, who knows. But, I do know that there's plenty of admins out there that really hope this feature set comes back in some form or another.
Have you used SoftGrid with ZeroTouch? What are your opinions about the technology? Let us all know in the comments.
Source: http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2007/02/13/microsoft-softgrid-and-zerotouch.aspx
Comments
Try AppStream and SVS combination. It has good streaming and license management capabilities as well as virtualization through SVS. You can decide to Virtualize some apps while you can stream others to integrate with desktops.
The two products (SVS and AppStream) together is much better option than Softgrid.
Ajay
Posted by: Ajay Kalashektra | February 24, 2007 8:29 PM
Thanks for the thought. The only tool I've look at so far personally is the SoftGrid product, but InfoWorld did a nice write-up on Thinstall in their last issue. I'll be linking to it later on this week. Have you played with Thinstall? Any good comparisons?
/Greggo
Posted by: Greg Shields | February 25, 2007 9:21 PM