#28 - Glad to have helped. SCE is a lot of that and in many ways, more - essentially, it is a very lightweight way to centrally manage many remote and unique networks. For many companies - my own included, it may be ideal. It allows providers to add a lot of value by effectively managing remote client networks and it certainly supports remote access and remote control. One of the very good things to come out of this effort and frankly, Vista dev, was a NAT [even transverse] friendly RDP/TSAC and Remote Assistance client.
*** Home Server leverages this, too - but adds the ability to search the remote server and download/upload files - even in batches, whit packs/zips and then send to the user in a single click process.
I use that as an easy to illustrate example, as SCE is doing much of the same thing - deployment of SW, for example - in images/packages.
Finally, the monitoring and reporting - GWAD I love that - they engineer can know/see ahead of time what is going on and when set alongside Vista - where user state, etc... is virtualized, getting someone going again is so quick and painless.
Now consider this.... where this will head - with essentially an Enterprise OS that applies to small home networks as well as it does small business and global enterprises.
Consider - an OS will always be used to support the hardware layer. While an OS and its API's communicate with the processor as computers do... people get mixed up, because that is not how home networks, small business or enterprise networks function - all of these need to control access, changes in data and how documents and communications are approved [also why Google is way too young to do anything but NOT GET this any time soon]. In Vista, Workflow Foundation pulls information from just about any application and displays it to the UI. Workflow controls how that data is changed. Microsoft already has the roles based approval process/tools in WSS/SPS, so their platform can protect change and file as needed to a repository of any size [think home server on one end and storage server based SANs on the other - each so very dynamic, too and easy to manage].
Now, as one guy put it, "Now all MSFT has to do is get enough people to build apps using the Workflow foundation API's. They then replace the UI with SharePoint and the technology cocktail becomes an enterprise OS. Much like the API's on windows, now you use the API's of the workflow foundation to plug your application into an enterprise under their UI." <no name available>
So one can see where it will all end up - a very rich, very diverse individually centric environment where devs focus on the workflow, leverage the WPF and BLEP the crud out of business processes - in our shop, we center on "Information and Products"
SCE will make it possible for admins/providers to manage all forms of remote systems and networks from one location - Microsoft essentially handed it to companies like mine, so tapping recurring service revenue would be possible ***Course we already had been doing that, but this makes it easier on us.
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