Virtual Desktops are beyond VDI

Many things have been written about the world according to virtual desktops and there are many things that need to be considered. One of those things is user experience.

User Experience is one of those things that IT don't generally think about until after the first complaint, the business doesn't think about user experience at all and developers rely on user acceptance testing scripts to simulate user experience based upon their idea of what it should be.

User Experience should be the first thing that needs to be address in virtual computing, virtual desktops or even virtual applications, WHY?? because unless you have people wanting to use this technology every day, day in day out and with a smile on their face, then this technology will never make the mainstream enterprise businesses as a strategic requirement.

How do I make it the best user experience?? Easy, simply make the desktop the best experience it can be, for personal use, for multimedia use, for application use and make it evolve as the user evolves their wants and needs.

I know this sounds daunting and complex but really it isn't. First things first, understand what kind of users you have in your organisation, their needs and the wants in terms of applications and the way they work. Most users fall into 5 categories. Task Workers, Knowledge Workers, Power Workers, Mobile Workers and The Rest.

Task Workers have simple needs, generally wanting to access the same applications every day to do the same thing every day.

Knowledge Workers want some form of personalisation and require a greater level of flexibility in terms of the day to day work or application needs.

Power Workers are very demanding on their time, generally want things immediately and are very random on the structure of their day.

Mobile Workers are people who are a mix of the above user types but spend a lot of time off the grid, on the move and generally are very time conscious of how they work.

The rest tend to fall outside these needs and generally can be dealt with on a one to one basis as discovered.

So how do meet all these users needs with my desktop?
Seperate the layers... Seperate your OS from your Apps and from your Profiles and build them as needed on the fly at run time. Don't install your apps, virtualise them, don't have local profiles, deliver them as needed, its simple.

Believe or not there are more types of virtual desktops than just the VDI model being offered by some companies today. In fact virtual desktop have been around for 20 years, but I digress. There again actually 4 models of virtual desktop, VDI, Hosted shared, Streamed and Local VM.

Now here is the trick that makes it all easy. Simply match the desktop delivery model to the user type.

Task Workers for example would only require the Hosted Shared Desktop because for IT it offers the best ROI while providing the core basic need for the user of application access, on top of this it is centralised to manage and easy to lock down the data securely.
Mobile Workers could vary between a VDI desktop located centrally (if they have connectivity) or a Local VM (virtual machine) that runs on a laptop on a local hypervisor. it can be offline and managed centrally at the same time.

The best part about all of this... It can be done with a single product suite. One set of tools to build, manage, deliver and maintain any type of virtual desktop you want to deliver to your users. Add to this the ability to virtualise your applications to each of these desktop types and you have not only achieved a more user rich experience in content and performance over any kind of network, but an ease of management of the desktop like never before.

Whats the product suite.... thats simple XenDesktop...

It covers all these things and more... virtual desktops are beyond VDI and VDI is only one type of virtual desktop. Believe me when I say virtual desktops are not like virtual servers and user demand a level of experience that server virtualisation cannot supply. It is only when you discover this can you deliver the right desktop to the right user with the right experience, and that is XenDesktop.