The last couple of weekends I’ve spent playing with Droplet Computing application containers solution. As ever getting “stick time” with any technology inevitably leads to thoughts about future functionality. I think the tricky thing for any new company is how far they want to carve out new features of their own, and run the risk of re-inventing a wheel that’s already been invented and in use already.
The dilemma though, is if you don’t spell out a management vision for a technology that’s essentially a platform, do you run the risk of looking like you’re lacking “vision”? The danger is you just want to be yet another vendor, with yet another ‘single pane of glass’ to be added alongside all the other ‘multiple pains of glass’ that customers have to toggle between. I guess the short part of that long-winded statement – what’s the best approach? To integrate or innovate?
I guess some Smart Alec would say the ideal thing would be to do both. Listen to customers and their needs and requirements and come up with solutions and functionality that addresses those needs. The only downside of this customer approach is customers can have a tendency to demand things, because they think they “should” be there. Only for the ISV to find out that this was tick-box exercise, and you have squandered precious development time for no reasonable benefit. It used to infuriate me when I suggested areas for improvement to VMware, only to be asked to explain and justify my thinking. Couldn’t they just see it was obvious! Of course, the reason I was asked to make my use case every time was to avoid the very situation I’ve just described. So featurism – the desire to add more features and options without a good use-case – is a crime I know I have been guilty of in the past. It’s crime I’m likely to continue to commit until I retire.
So, that gets me to the explanation of the title of this blogpost. Drip. Drip. It strikes me that the best kind of improvements to a new technology take little coding effort and improves functionality for all customers. A rapid series of quick updates is far easier to pivot, than massive undertakings that might take months to complete.
I think there’s another distinction to make with this type of approach. Do those drip-drip enhancements improve the users experience, or the administrator’s life and the deployment experience? For that reason, I’m going to separate them because at the end of the day no end-user ever patted on my back for well-administered systems.
User Experience:
Printing:
At the moment the only print support inside the container is for the native print driver that needs to be installed and configured by the administrator. Of course, customers may already have a license for some kind of universal print solution such as UniPrint. I think it would be great if Droplet Computing had some type of redistribution deal with a company like UniPrint. Ideally, this feature would retrieve the print configuration from the device OS, and then bubble those up into the container OS. This means the print configuration is ultimately managed by existing policies, profiles and/or scripts used to prepare the users environment to the device OS.
Unity-like Functionality:
If you’ve ever used something like VMware Fusion, you’ll have come across so-called “unity” style experience. This unity experience would essentially “hide” the Container environment as much as possible. Leaving just the application floating on the screen, and perhaps also creating shortcuts to Droplet Computing Apps contained inside the Droplet Computing Container. The end-user doesn’t need to interact with the “tiles” view in the main application.
But instead gains access to their application from an icon on their desktop. That said I’ve always been irritated about desktop icon clutter, where the entire desktop is covered with icons. Some kind of “Droplet Computing Apps” folder on the desktop that contains all the icons would be neat.
Content Redirection:
This is a Citrix feature that’s been around for sometimes. There are two types of “redirection”; one that takes from the device OS into the Container OS, and another that takes you out of the Container OS back to the Device OS. The former is 9 times out 10 the most common.
It’s very common for a user to find a document in a folder and want to open it with a double-click. Historically, in Windows that process been controlled with MIME file associations held in the registry. It can be tricky to get right. After all, generally file extensions tend to have no version information in them. For instance, the .PDF extension doesn’t help me decide if that application should run locally or within the Container OS. Nor does it help me in a situation where 9 times of 10, it should open locally, but in particular application scenarios it should open in the Container OS.
However, it is possible to create program logic that says for all Excel 2010 spreadsheets requiring Macros, to open in Excel 2010 in the Container OS, and for all spreadsheets created in Office 2016 open them Excel 2016. It would be possible to redirect these double clicks for the entire legacy XLS, XLM and XLT files to the Container OS. And to redirect all XLSX, XLSM, XLTX, and XLW to be redirected to a newer version of Excel running in the Device OS.
This kind of redirection also requires a method of passing the location of the file to the Container OS which I can used to retrieve the file. It’s one thing to call an .EXE using file extensions, and then another to then retrieve the data. It will generally require a communication channel and a file sharing protocol between the Device OS and Container OS. And then there’s the tricky issue of authenticating the users access to the file – would that use the Device OS credentials passed-through to the Container OS, or would it use the credentials of the Container OS?
The other type of redirection flows in the opposite direction. This is typically where a link to some multi-media format is found in a web page or embedded as a link inside an application running in the container. In most cases that YouTube link, MP3 or MP4 video would be best played by locally installed application within the domain of Device OS. I see this as being less of an issue because the action happens less frequently as a double-click to open a file – because it’s easier to create and encode a simple “multi-media” rule to redirect all such links back to the Device OS.
Administrator Experience:
Multi-Container Support:
Currently the Container OS being used is Windows XP, and I understand a Windows 7 Container OS build is on its way. Although I think the numbers of users needing both Container OS’s at the same time would be quite small, it would be nice if there was an easy way for administrators to give access two more than one container at time – and for users to have an easy way to toggle between them. This isn’t a biggie as I suspect the number of people doing this will limited, and the best practise will be to keep these images to a minimum. Right now, it’s up to the user to browse between various image files. A task that’s probably beyond the abilities of the average user.
Tile Management – Clipboard and Browsing for .EXE:
Right now, the administrator has to type in paths to the EXE’s held within the Container OS. I would like to see the ability to browse these paths, rather needing to type them. Together with that I’d like to see the ability to copy an existing “tile” and modifying to reduce this sort browsing function to a minimum. It’s perhaps not a huge issue – it maybe that many customers of Droplet Computing are using the Container OS to deliver a single strategic legacy application rather than multiple applications after all.
Ideally, I’d like to see some sort of programable or scriptable method of setting up this environment, even if it something as crude as copying down an .ini file. I’ve no idea of where the tile data that makes up granted applications is stored, but I understand it’s not held within the Droplet Computing Image. So, it must be held somewhere probably in an ASCII file of some description. I assume the tile configuration is held in the user’s profile – so if they roam around the organization they find their Droplet Computing Container configuration follows them.
Web-Browser Support:
Currently, the Windows XP version of the Container OS contains no web-browser. I think that’s intentional to reduce the attack surface that legacy browsers bring, as well as keeping the Droplet Computing Image slim. That does present challenges – such as downloading software into the Container OS. I was forced to do that with an external NAS device that wasn’t too painful, but it does mean sourcing every piece of software from the Device OS and leaving it on shared locations.
It makes things like setting up the Container OS for Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive trickier. A lot of the download pages for these sites just inspect the OS with the web-browser to detect the extension required.
[Note: It’s perhaps worth noting that some of these extensions no longer work with Windows XP. For instance, Dropbox no longer supports Window XP for their download that extends the Windows Explorer environment.]
In the end I installed the K-Meleon (http://kmeleonbrowser.org/) web-browser into the Container OS that then allowed me to get some of my online software providers and extensions.
Conclusions:
This is my third and final post on Droplet Computing, but I’m sure I will be back for more in future. It’s worth remembering that users care less about HOW they get their applications, more than they just get them. So, whether its local or remote VDI, Server-based computing in the form of Citrix or Microsoft RDS or a Droplet Computing Container – they really aren’t that bothered by the delivery mechanisms. I know WE are, but they aren’t. And this is a reality that is often forgotten.
Ease of use is critical, and any delivery mechanisms that “gets in the way” of the user being productive is a distraction by any other name. Any feature or absence of a feature that results in a help desk ticket needs to be addressed. And, ideally, the delivery mechanisms must offer improved performance, ease of use and value for money to be able to unseat the incumbents. The ideal should be all three – but if a company can deliver two of these in a solution they will get traction in the marketplace.
It’s interesting how application delivery in the form of Containers has come full-circle. The much-loathed PC is a resilient little computing platform, one that has endured and survived huge changes in the last 40-odd years. Dismiss it at your peril. For me it’s testament to the economies of scale that the PC has honed over the years. Despite the rise of tablets and phones, these devices have excelled at delivering simple single-use applications.
But when it comes to the more productive knowledge work, it’s still the Office Suite of applications they spend hours in front of writing reports, presentations and maintaining the dreaded spreadsheet. Alongside these business-critical end-user applications, is a whole raft of applications that customers want to carry on using well beyond the vendors perception of end-of-life. It’s for these reasons I think the “Container” approach as delivered by Droplet Computing has legs. I can see customers adopting not just a method of delivering legacy applications to any type of device (Windows, Mac, Linux) but also as an application delivery method for new applications too.