The ManageFusion keynote was on Tuesday morning. We showed three things: User-based activation, IE virtualization, and SVS on a Stick! The user based activation was written by Jeremy and is extremely cool. It hooks into all of the winlogon events and allows the admin to do any kind of SVS functions at those times. It does all of the right things like impersonating the user to be able to download a VSA from a network share, etc. We showed that different applications that handled doc files were activated for different users.

We also showed our ability to virtualize what IE does. Basically we start IE and tell SVS to treat it as if it is running from a particular layer. Then everything that IE does (cookies, cache, history, user config changes, etc) are all put into the layer. Delete the layer and it all goes away.

The big ticket item though was SVS on a stick. I had a laptop that did not have SVS or MS Office on it. I plugged a U3 enabled USB 1 GB stick into the laptop and stepped back. Twenty-five seconds later MS Office was activated and available. Big applause. I then launched Excel. The cool thing about this is that it comes up at what I consider to be native speed. You can't tell that it isn't installed. What happens under the covers is that the registry data is loaded from files on the USB stick (this is a mount, not an import), the SVS driver is loaded from the stick, the layer is activated. Shazaam, a fully functional version of Office that performs at near native speeds and that appears to the user as if it is installed on the system. Shutting down is just as cool. Simply a deactivate, unmount of the registry files (fast), and Office was never on the system.

To demo the SVS on a stick thing, I uninstalled Office from my laptop and had no way to re-install it. So for the rest of the conference I've been running it off the stick. It has worked flawlessly for me during this time.

Supposedly this was recorded and we'll be putting the video up on the Juice.