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New Technology Virtual Desktops Roaming Around Get things done The beauty of roaming desktops Efficiency, cheapness, scalability and robustness   If your professional life revolves around your desktop PC, you can now free yourself from desktop tyranny. With everything you need now on the web, you'll no longer be chained to your desk. Find a virtual desktop provider to leverage the power of the web by making your desktop accessible anywhere, anytime, from any browser. It might change the way you work forever Get things done One of the major benefits from a user's perspective, is to be able to sit at any strange workstation and get things done immediately, regardless of what strange, customized environment is being used. If last year's buzzword was Web portal, this year it may well be the virtual desktop, also known as the roaming desktop. Today, virtual desktops are being promoted for their convenience, but they take 'personal' a step further: users have constant access to their files, their address books and their calculators. So when Amy Causer suffered a laptop and a PC crash within a couple of days of each other, causing irreparable damage, you would expect her to be frantic. Not so. Ms Causer's office is a computer screen, whether at home, in the car, at work, she keeps all her files and documents on a computer. But when it all crashed she was able to stay calm. Her work was saved in a 'safe deposit box in the sky', an online area that had been serving as her virtual desktop. Within days, she had a new laptop and had logged onto a Web site to retrieve her documents. She uses visto.com to send and receive email, store and share files and photos, calendar, address book, bookmarks, to-do lists-everything she keeps on her desktop. That means every computer with a modem - deployed in the thousands across factory floors and office blocks, drawing applications and files from a server costing tens of thousands of dollars can be utilised. So far, virtual desktop services are fragmented. Some companies offer online storage for financial reports and text documents, others for briefcase items such as calendars and photos. Desktop.com gives you 10 MB of free storage space to keep what you need within reach, no matter where you are. Access everything from your financial files to your unfinished screenplays whether you're traveling to a friend's house or across the country. Share with other Desktop.com users, or simply stash a resume or a love letter here to keep your personal life private. The beauty of roaming desktops The beauty of roaming desktops is that the client machine is stateless, meaning that if the computer you're using for a remote control dies on you suddenly, the application you were controlling is still running on the server unaffected. You can move to a different computer, login, and literally resume from the same file and cursor position you left off at. There are some safety and reliability concerns, as well as the issue of storing all your information in one place. Many people already use ad hoc versions of virtual desktops - sending work documents to a home email and then emailing them back again - or setting up a roaming email account like Yahoo! or hotmail.com. Once information resides on a networked server, outside a private hard drive, anyone with a password can enter. The virtual desktop companies promise their customers' documents are safe; many encrypt the materials and backup procedures are common. However, if you work between you home, the office and your laptop, wouldn't it be better to have your newly updated documents to hand - wherever you are? If you had the 'safety deposit box in the sky' your latest documents would always be available. Users create desktops by setting up their user IDs and passwords. Then they upload files from their computers into the servers maintained by the desktop companies. The name of the product IBM has placed its Network Computer technology into is called Workspace On Demand, or "WSOD" for short. It's based on Warp Server and performs several feats such as booting a computer across the network and providing a roaming desktop that follows you from computer to computer. It's designed to make use of the hundreds of obsolete PCs that are scattered around almost every company in the world -- old PCs with small hard drives, weak processors and shallow amounts of RAM. Efficiency, cheapness, scalability and robustness Its purpose is to bring back the Mainframe and Terminal era and the efficiency, cheapness, scalability and robustness associated with it. If a computer crashes irretrievably, it's cheaply replaced. No precious files or user preferences or phone books are lost as everything is stored on the server. Plus, as a worker roams across the globe, any computer becomes a personal workstation, with a desktop and applications and preferences intact. This scenario is highly desirable for companies besieged with Windows crashes, staggering upgrade and "Cost of Ownership" expenses, high failure rates and crippling data loss. If the server makes up for these deficiencies somehow, then all those junk PCs become usable and valuable again, saving the company a write-off. Writer: Lindsey Wood © Copyright 2001. Galt Western Personnel Ltd. Unless otherwise specified, you may reprint this article, quote from it, use it in research or projects, duplicate it or distribute it. Credit of authorship and source MUST be given to galtglobalreview.com. Ownership of Copyright remains with Galt Western Personnel Ltd.     Return to Top      Business News / Business Roundup - Australia / Canada / Europe / United States / Careers / Classified / Information Technology / New Technology / Education News / World Facts / Book Reviews / Archives/Research