The key word for today is virtualization. And verily, it is virtually good.

Less than six months after acquiring Thinstall in January, VMware has announced, at Microsoft Tech-Ed Professional being held in Florida today through Friday, that it's releasing VMware ThinApp 4.0, based on Thinstall's product.

This has two new features, Application Link and Application Sync. These enable two virtualized applications to communicate with one another, and let systems administrators update virtual apps remotely.

"We decouple operating systems from the hardware by virtualizing key resources like networking, the CPU, memory and disk, and allow the OS to be contained in a VM, and let multiple VMs run on the same server or on different servers, fully encapsulated from the hardware," VMware's Ed Albanese told me, adding that the company's approach to application virtualization is "very innovative".

This approach eliminates system conflicts so you can "deploy an XP or Windows 2000 image in a Vista image and move the VM from one PC to another at the desktop," Albanese told me, adding that the image can be deployed anywhere -- "a terminal services environment, a Citrix environment, a physical PC, a virtual desktop, a USB key stick." OSes supported are Windows XP, NT, 2000 and Vista; and the application supports 32- and 64-bit Windows hosts.

Fascinating...but being able to bung your VM onto a thumb drive et cetera are pretty standard when you use virtual images. And it wasn't a million years ago that I wrote about Xenocode, which virtualizes applications and lets you "run Office 2003 and 2007 side by side on the same desktop or run IE6 on Windows Vista" and about MokaFive's Virtual Desktop Solution, which automates lifecycle management for virtual machines.

Xenocode uses its own hypervisor while MokaFive uses VMware's VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) -- the core virtual layer that separates the hardware from the software -- and builds intelligent services around it.

The Concordia Project has just announced the use case presentation line-up for its first public workshop on policy and entitlements management.

This will be held June 23 at the Burton Catalyst Conference 2008 in San Diego.

Representatives from Cisco, Boeing, Micron, Oracle/BEA Systems and the U.S. Army will present policy management use case scenarios to a panel of Concordia technology and policy experts.

The scenarios will include entitle and fine-grained authorization in the enterprise, and there can be no more fine-grained authorization than in the army, where everything, down to the number of hairs on your head, can be stamped classified.

The Concordia community will then work on prioritizing the next steps involved in developing solutions to meet the requirements that will crop up in the scenarios.

What, you may be asking, is the Concordia project? It's a global initiative to drive interoperability across identity protocols in use today.

Participants take on a project when a deployer presents a problem that existing identity protocols do not solve, work with the Internet community to document resulting use cases, requirements and interoperability scenarios, record these on the Concordia wiki and feed the use cases and requirements to a technical group which develops applicable specifications.

That ol' Internet sure gets leveraged.

Rich Internet applications and mashups have made that old saw, 'Vox populi, vox Dei' really hit home.

Once users saw how easy it is to do mashups and all that other cool stuff on Google, Yahoo et al, they began demanding it at their corporate desktops.

The vendors are happy to go along because it's more money for them; but enterprises have to make sure they have at least some idea of the ROI they can expect before jumping on the bandwagon. After all, just because the technology's there doesn't mean you have to bankrupt yourself implementing it.

That having been said, digital map and dynamic content provider Tele Atlas has leveraged Oracle Universal Content Management nicely to deploy dynamic, up-to-date region-specific content across its Websites in 14 languages around the world.

It leverages one Oracle-based content repository to repurpose content on the fly; business users can make changes to the site, review the changes online, submit the changes to an automated approval process (remember the old days of automated workflow?), then post them on the live site themselves.

That's a far cry from the days when any changes would have to be submitted physically to managers' desks and slowly work their way up through the hierarchy and managers spent a disproportionate amount of their time on simple approvals and other administrative tasks.

Meanwhile, newbie virtualization company Neocleus, which has enhanced and modified the Xen Open Source hypervisor to include a GUI and several connectivity and compatibility options, as reported previously in InternetNews.com, (http://www.internetnews.com/software/article.php/3745566) has teamed up with Fujitsu Consulting to provide enterprises with its endpoint IT management solutions.

Fujitsu will provide the system integration expertise and services, and Neocleus its Type 1 open source hypervisor for endpoints.

Neocleus's premise is that removing IP and security agents outside of Windows so the operating system can be treated as a file will make it install cleaner and be easier to restore.

Also, moving antivirus applications outside Windows will make it more secure as the antivirus applications depend on the same API that Trojan Horses are trying to capture.

Some had voiced doubt that this would work, but it looks as if Neocleus is forging right ahead.