User Experience Virtualization Beta 2

Microsoft announced Tuesday morning that it has delivered the second beta of its upcoming User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) solution, its new member of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). The company had previously promised to deliver UE-V Beta 2 by the end of the June.

“This latest beta of UE-V will have new functionality,” Microsoft’s Karri Alexion-Tiernan notes in a post to the Windows For Your Business Blog, “including roaming system settings between Windows 7 and Windows 8, support for additional operating system settings including Start menu, Taskbar and folders options; group policy support to ensure agent configuration consistency, and the roaming and sync of settings between Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10.”

UE-V might be viewed as a managed version of the SkyDrive-based settings sync functionality in Windows 8. It lets you centrally store, or virtualize, managed users’ settings and then reapply them to different PCs each time they sign in. Microsoft sees this tool as part of a wider effort it calls Microsoft Desktop Virtualization, in which it lets users use virtually any application anywhere and access Windows everywhere.

Other tools in the MDOP suite, especially Application Virtualization (App-V), and related technologies like folder redirection and offline files, complete this vision.

You can download User Experience Virtualization Beta 2 from the Microsoft web site. 

To learn more, check out Stephen Rose’s comprehensive post, What to Expect in User Experience Virtualization Beta 2, on the Springboard Series Blog.