Alrighty, so if you are not familiar with  SoftGrid then you need to check it out! - [t's one of my favourite infrastructure technologies - *grin*]... Formerly Softricity (an MS acquistion) it is how Microsoft do application virtualization. taking a step  back there's lots of different types of virtualization most people think of virtualization as simply server/OS virtualization (think: Virtual Server 2005 R2 or VMWare[-grrr]), desktop virtualization(think: Virtual PC 2007) presentation layer virtualization (think: Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services and/or Citrix) and finally application presentation layer virtualization: Softgrid!

SoftGrid is basically the abilty to stream applications or just parts of them on demand.. these applications run in a sandbox or bubble (-don't like the word 'bubble' - but it will do for now if you get the point) where nothing gets added to the registry on the local machines & nothing is installed under program files... nice things about this is that normally conflicting apps can happily co-exist on a machine - for example apps - using multiple JDK versions(remember no entries in the reg. etc) you can hot patch apps (simply patch the application on the streaming server - next time user launches the app from their machine the deltas (not the full app!) are streamed down) re-provising applicaitions is simple - simply re-stream down - none of the messy uninstall/reinstall, virtual apps can be cached on the client for offline use for up to 60 days...and I could go on & and on & on....

Anyways, the short & long of it being there is a very nice solution accelerator on its way which will let you package the virtualized apps as MSIs(cooool!). So you can distribute the apps to online/offline users any which way to your hearts content (for example on a cd! - previously this used to be streaming on demand or pre-provisioned with SMS using the SMS<->SoftGrid connector) 

For an overview of the utlity see diagram below (will be a SA for SoftGrid 4.1/4.2 & native to 4.5) - expect this in Q4 CY2007 -:-)

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