From corporate blog Softgrid development team unofficially opens version 4.5 Technology Adoption Program (TAP):
The Microsoft SoftGrid team is currently wrapping up our SoftGrid 4.2 release, but is also already hard at work on our next release, version 4.5. New capabilities that we are building into SoftGrid 4.5 include:
- Enhanced client scalability: improvements to allow very large deployments and integration with ESD systems, such as System Center Configuration Manager
- Availability and maintainability: the most stable and reliable version of SoftGrid to date
- Security tightening: the first SoftGrid release to go through the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) and enhancements to support internet-facing scenarios
- Globalization and localization: support for both virtualizing non-English language applications and running the SoftGrid user interface in certain non-English languages
Surprisingly SoftGrid team also discloses details about release scheduling:
- September: Lab-only use release of SoftGrid 4.5
- Late October: Beta release of SoftGrid 4.5 and production deployments begin
- Mid March: Release Candidate release of SoftGrid 4.5 and production upgrades/additional deployments begin
- May/June: RTM of SoftGrid 4.5
Before this release anyway Microsoft plans to release client-only update of the platform, introducing support for new Windows Vista. This new version dubbed SoftGrid 4.2 is expected for July 1st, as announced at TechEd 2007 conference.
To enroll for SoftGrid 4.5 TAP compile a survey here.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.