We've been participating in the Online Crash Analysis (OCA) program at MS for a while now. This is an extremely valuable program for us. When a user is prompted to send crash data to MS, this is where it goes. Basically what happens is that a mini-dump is transferred to MS, an automated "!analyze" (windbg command) is done, the system determines a likely person to blame, and the mini-dump is made available to that company. Vince, who runs the program, claims that they have the world's largest MS SQL database that holds all of this information.

MS doesn't keep any information around that could be used to identify a machine or user. I know this because we were looking at some particular crashes with the OCA team and trying to determine if it was the same system or not.

MS provides a nice web interface for accessing this data. We can view the data by crash type, version, etc. We can also download any mini-dumps that we want to analyze. Most of the time Mike can figure out what we did wrong by looking at these. We have been able to find and fix many issues that were never reported by any customer.

By focusing on these we have been able to make SVS super stable in a relatively short time.

So when you are prompted to send data to MS, say "yes".

We had a couple of great MF events in Orlando and in Vienna. Interest in SVS is very high. Also this time we had some of our SVS partners there, AppStream, Scense, and Fujitsu Siemens.

AppStream has a very cool product that is used to quickly and reliably do software delivery using file streaming. They have added SVS support so now they can easily stream SVS virtual software packages. Besides streaming they have some big value around license management.

Scense is coming out with a new user-based software delivery system. They have also integrated complete control of the SVS system into this product. Another big thing they have done is allow SVS to be used in a Citrix environment.

One of the more interesting new things that I saw being done with SVS was presented by Fujitsu Siemens. They are offering a service where they will pre-load new machines with specified applications in SVS format. There were two reasons that they gave for this. The first was that install times for the applications was much faster using SVS. The second was that they wanted to give the customer the ability to safely "turn off" applications on their systems without reinstalling the whole OS.