Office 2010 Serial Microsoft (finally) broadens Wi

Microsoft has lifted its ban on enabling Windows Vista House Fundamental and Household Premium in virtual machine environments.
The business introduced on January 21 its decision to add the two new SKUs and planned to update its end-user license agreement to reflect the change.
(Microsoft was arranging on creating the announcement at 12:01 a.m. on January 22, but an additional publication broke the embargo, so the company is heading out with the news early.)
Microsoft nearly announced in June, 2007, that it was relaxing a number of its virtualization guidelines for Windows Vista,Office 2010 Professional Key, in order to permit users of a wider number of Vista SKUs to make use of virtualization technology about the desktop. Then, within the eleventh hour,Cheap Windows 7, something happened — exactly what still remains unclear — and Microsoft ended up halting the planned virtualization changes.
For businesses,Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft is offering an annual subscription to what it;s calling the “Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop” for $23 per desktop for clients covered by Software Assurance. This offering, which allows clients to run Vista practically being a server, previously was priced at $78 per desktop, according to firm officials.
Microsoft also introduced it has acquired Calista Technologies, a San Jose, Calif.-based desktop-virtualization specialist, for an undisclosed amount. Here;s Microsoft;s description of what Calist;s software does:
“Calista software improves the user experience of 3-D and multimedia delivery for Microsoft multimedia applications, virtualized desktop deployments, and server-hosted virtualized desktops or applications implementing Windows Server Terminal Services. The addition of Calista technology to Microsoft’s virtualization portfolio will enable individuals to watch video and listen to audio, and will enable remote workers to receive a full-fidelity Windows desktop experience without the need for high-end desktop hardware. “
(”Application delivery” expert Brian Madden provided a great deal more details on Calista and how its technologies could dovetail with Microsoft;s in a prescient post last November.)
Microsoft is preparing to announce these virtualization changes at a two-day Virtualization Deployment Summit for about 300 of its clients, which kicks off on January 21.
Until today, Microsoft’s end-user license agreement stipulated that people could run only the Business and Ultimate versions of Vista in virtual machines from Microsoft and other vendors. Microsoft attributed the original Vista virtualization restrictions to potential security risks, claiming that “security researchers have shown hardware virtualization technology to get exploitable by malware” and claimed Vista required an advanced level of know-how to thwart such virtualization exploits.
Any thought on Microsoft;s client-side virtualization changes? A lot more to come on this story as it unfolds….
More updates from Microsoft:
* Microsoft isn;t ready to talk specifics about how/when it plans to add the Calista technology to its products. But organization officials are characterizing Calista;s technologies as some thing Microsoft sees being a “platform technology” which it plans to create “as widely available as possible.” Perhaps we;ll see it folded into Windows 7 ….
* Why has Microsoft decided to add support for Property Basic and Household Premium now? Officials said on Monday that Microsoft is seeing “a maturity inside the industry,” in terms of being in a position to trust “what;s under the virtual machine.” But it doesn;t hurt, either, that adding Household Fundamental and House Premium will help customers run older applications that software vendors are not updating to support Vista.
* While Microsoft did add its consumer Vista SKUs (Home Simple and Home Premium) to the list of products it will allow consumers to run in virtualized environments,Windows 7 Professional, the organization is not allowing for the virtualized use of information-rights management,Office 2010 Serial, digital-rights management and BitLocker encryption. (These were among the other licensing changes Microsoft contemplated creating last June and pulled at the last minute.)
Update to the updates (on January 22): Contrary to what I was told yesterday, Microsoft is now saying that it is not prohibiting the virtualized use of information-rights management, digital-rights management and BitLocker encryption. From a corporate spokesman: “The EULA (End Consumer License Agreement) advises against by using these technologies for security reasons, but does not prohibit their use.”