Microsoft WVD (Windows Virtual Desktop) has set the Microsoft Windows world on its ear! Everyone is interested to learn more about Microsoft’s forthcoming Azure-hosted virtual desktop that promises to be more turnkey then any solution we’ve seen to date.

Microsoft’s public preview is currently underway, allowing your organization to kick the tires of one of the most anticipated desktop delivery platforms ever launched. Liquidware is a chosen inaugural partner of the Microsoft WVD partner ecosystem. As a Microsoft partner of WVD we’ve been aware of the development and the solution for the past two years.

Liquidware recently delivered a well-attended webinar about Microsoft WVD where wef fieldeddozens of questions. We know first-hand that the community has a ton of interest and even more questions.  For instance, many people want to know what version of Microsoft Windows or M365 they need to be on to qualify for WVD (i.e. E3, E5, F1). While some even are curious to know if they only need to have Microsoft Office to qualify. Others are hungry to learn about Azure compute costs, wanting to know how much should they budget. With this in mind, we’ve created this new unofficial Introduction to

Excerpt Graphic: Microsoft WVD, How Did we Get Here? 

Microsoft WVD Whitepaper that includes what we know about availability timing, the history of how and why Microsoft created WVD, key complementing solutions for success and even an online cost calculator that gives your organization an idea of the estimated cost of WVD. You’ll only find this information in one place right now, straight from Liquidware.

We’ve Lived It!
The staff at Liquidware who contributed to this paper have been in the industry since the early 90s. Many worked or partnered with Citrix and Microsoft as far back as Citrix’s earliest technology including MultiWin and WinView. We’ve lived the history and seen the evolution of Windows desktops first-hand. We’re not usually shy about tooting our own horn but we find ourselves ideally equipped in the industry to offer you a unique perspective and honest answers about Microsoft WVD.

Download the whitepaper now. You’ll find a link to the online cost estimator in the paper. After you give it a read, let us know what you think by posting your comments below.

More about Liquidware and Microsoft WVD
Liquidware’s FlexApp Application Layering solution is a natural fit to make it easier to deploy applications to non-persistent desktops while keeping the number of base images to a minimum. Additionally, our ProfileUnity User Environment Management solution extends the functionality of Microsoft FSLogix to add cross-OS compatibility and fast backup and restore of profile containers as well as centralized policy management with context awareness. Our Stratusphere UX monitoring and diagnostics solution is also a perfect fit by enabling assessment and user experience metrics that help you grow and scale WVD deployments.

Six months ago we added Process Optimization to the Stratusphere Connector ID Key (CID Key). With the upcoming release of Stratusphere UX 6.1.3, we’ve added some important enhancements to the feature. For those not familiar, Process Optimization helps minimize the effects of poorly performing applications and processes by prioritizing the CPU resources available to those that are in-focus by the end user. In short, this set-it-and-forget-it Stratusphere UX feature provides a user experience safety net. A safety net to ensure in-focus applications get the resources they need, but also to guard against unplanned-for background processes (and memory—more on that in a bit) causing a negative effect on user performance.

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To continue our Microsoft 365 blog series, today we will be focusing on Microsoft Teams and how Liquidware can help businesses manage and deploy it.

For those that don’t know, Teams has been developed as the successor to Skype for Business and Microsoft’s answer to group-chat applications such as Slack. Unsurprisingly, Teams has seen a massive uptake within businesses and there has been significant push on developing new features as quickly as possible (Microsoft have taken the approach of basing Teams on Electron).

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As part of a series of posts, we’ll be exploring how Microsoft 365 and Liquidware’s Adaptive Workspace Management suite can complement each other and provide businesses with more productive and secure end users.

Microsoft 365 provides administrators with some great modern tools in order to manage and analyse their end user estate, such as Azure Active Directory, Windows Information Protection and MyAnalytics. Stratusphere UX is able to extend this toolset by providing user experience (UX) reporting and allowing for device assessment. This enables administrators to determine which users are best suited to take on new Microsoft 365 services such as Windows Virtual Desktop and get the most out of your Microsoft licensing.

I’m excited to share this contributed post as it’s a topic and message I believe is quite important. In this new edition, end-user computing expert Peter von Oven writes of the user onboarding process and taking a user-centric approach to the transformation journey.

I love the approach of Putting User Experience at the Center of the Workspace. It’s an approach that is near and dear to Liquidware; and a core tenant of how Stratusphere UX has been designed. Peter’s book is focused predominantly on practical and actionable methods to best manage the user lifecycle of VDI atop the VMware platform, but the overall message is relevant for all user transformations—physical, virtual or cloud-delivered.

Look for it now at Packt Publishing and very soon on Amazon. Congrats Peter. –Kevin

Special Guest Blog
Author: Symon Perriman
(Symon@SymonPerriman.com, Twitter @SymonPerriman)

Desktop virtualization (or “VDI”) has become commonplace for organizations which need to offload processing from their end user devices to managed desktops due to performance or security needs.  Over the past decade, millions of these temporary virtual machines (VMs) have been created and destroyed by enterprises for their remote site workers, task workers, power users, or those operating in regulated industries with strict compliance needs.

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(2 minute read) – Microsoft WVD (Windows Virtual Desktop) is coming and Liquidware is hearing from many customers that they plan to deploy a proof-of-concept or pilot to test the waters as soon as possible. Microsoft has a public preview program in the works and you can now register here to apply for access to the program. If you’ve been following Microsoft WVD you’ve seen that Liquidware has been named by Microsoft to the short list of focused partners that Microsoft is working closely with, as mentioned in this Microsoft blog.

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The release of ProfileUnity and FlexApp v6.8 today is our best release ever! This release has several enhancements and new industry-first features that raise the bar.

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