Hello World,
This year we will try to speak about more topics in our blog. We will start a new (and small) series of posts related to the MDOP or Microsoft Desktop Optimization pack. We will not cover all the technologies included in the MDOP but a small subset of them that can be useful for us in our current work and existing project.
Note :
MDOP 2015 has been recently released. The only package that has been updated is the App-V one. They have published the App-V SP3, the rest of the applications we have not seen any major modifications.
What’s MDOP ?
So, the first question you might have is what’s MDOP ? MDOP is a suite of technologies that covers 3 main area : Virtualization, Management and Recovery.
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This suite of technologies are simply additional software offered to Microsoft customer through the Software Assurance Subscription process. You need to have an SA agreement in order to have access to these software solutions. MDOP basically offer additional functionalities to either existing software or provide new software solution that can be used within your organization based on your requirements.
The MDOP virtualization section offers the following software solutions :
- User Experience Virtualization (UE-V) which can be seen as a roaming profile replacement solution
- Application Virtualization (App-V) which offer new ways of deploying software and provide a solution to application compatibility issues
- MED-V is a solution that allows you to run legacy application in a virtual machine but where access is transparent for the user.
The MDOP Management section offers the following additional software :
- Microsoft Bitlocker Administration and Monitoring (MBAM) which provide a improved way to manage your infrastructure if you are using bitlocker within your organization. We really like the Self-Service Portal that has been included in the MBAM 2.0
- Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) which extends the current GPMC tool and allows you to track changes and perform delegation on GPOS creation and linking process.
The MDOP Recovery section offer the following additional tool to an organization :
- Disaster and Recovery Toolkit (DaRT) which is basically a WinPE image where additional recovery tools have been included. The most known tool would be probably the reset password tool but you can do more with it. We will discuss this later on.
As you can see or imagine, the MDOP is simply offering tools that can help an organization to better face situation. You can move from a reactive situation into a more proactive situation
What’s Next for us ?
We are more and more involved in VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) projects where the customer did not take into account the user experience and the delivery model for the applications. Because of that, in some projects, we might want to investigate the possibility offered by the MDOP solution given that our current customers are Microsoft based environment. Instead of paying for additional software solutions, we will spend some time in looking and testing the solution provided by Microsoft and see if this can fits the customer requirements.
Our focus will be on App-V, UE-V, Dart. If we have time and opportunity to test bitlocker, we will have also a look at the MBAM 2.0 and possibly at the AGMP. At the moment, we have no interest or projects where MED-V could be used.
Final Notes
This is it for today ! In the coming weeks, we will first describe how to work with DaRT and how can integrated this one within your infrastructure. The DaRT part should be quite short and not too difficult either. After that, we will probably move into topics related to virtualization and we will see what UE-V and App-V can offer in scenario like VDI.
If you have real interest for MDOP, let us know. If more people are interested, we might speed up the release of our posts about MDOP and the related technologies
Stay tuned
Till next time
See ya