Windows MultiPoint Server 2011 is almost here! See it in action.

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[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of Dean Paron a Product Unit Manager in Windows Multipoint Server]

Hey, this is Dean Paron, product unit manager, back to give you more information about Windows MultiPoint Server 2011. Over the past few months, we’ve posted blogs with links to the Windows MultiPoint Server 2011 Beta and Release Candidate (which is still available for you to evaluate, by the way!) Now I’m excited to provide you first with MultiPoint Server 2011 availability information, then show you the product in action through demos and customer stories.

Windows MultiPoint Server 2011 will be available for purchase in March of this year through our volume licensing channels. Starting in the second quarter of this calendar year, it will also be available through our OEM partners. Customers who have already purchased MultiPoint Server 2010 with Software Assurance (SA) have upgrade rights to MultiPoint Server 2011 when it becomes available in March. Or if customers want to purchase MultiPoint Server today, they simply need to purchase with SA in order to have the rights to MultiPoint Server 2011 upon availability.

Now the fun stuff.

In the prior blog posts, I listed a lot of the cool new features and functionality we’re bringing onboard. For IT Pros and tech staff, our goal is to continue to make MultiPoint Server easier to set up, deploy and manage since we know how resource constrained IT staffs can be. With MultiPoint Server 2011, you now have the ability to connect more types of clients over the school’s LAN, manage multiple MultiPoint Servers from a single MultiPoint Manager UI, and more. Let me allow James Duffus, our Group Program Manager, to tell you more and show you how it works.

Well, that’s all great. But what are our customers saying? We enlisted the Sultan and Bellevue School Districts in our early adopter program. They had been using MultiPoint Server 2010 and so we wanted them to help us test MultiPoint Server 2011 in a real school environment and give us feedback on whether we were helping to make things easier for them. We recently sat down with David Moon, IT Director at Sultan and Jason Oliphant, Workstation Computer Project Lead at Bellevue to see how everything was going…

Hopefully IT folks will see great benefits from WMS 2011 with regards to ease of setup, deployment and management. But we also know that IT needs to be responsive to teacher and student needs for implementing technology into classrooms, labs and libraries. For teachers, we’ve included more classroom orchestration and control functionality, such as thumbnail views and the ability to restrict where students can go on the internet or direct them to only those sites necessary for their current lesson. Here’s more from James….

Feedback from teachers using MultiPoint Server 2011 in classrooms, labs and libraries in Sultan and Bellevue has been positive. Listen…

Another major goal for us in delivering MultiPoint Server 2011 was to make sure that we can help education technology and business leaders achieve their technology visions of providing more technology access to students even with shrinking budgets. Check out the blog posted by my colleague, Gavriella Schuster, where Bellevue School District’s Manager of Network Operations, Jason Golec, talks about how he saved $135,000 for his district by implementing MultiPoint Server in just one of his schools. And here, David Moon talks about how he can save money by repurposing old hardware.

But most important, I’m excited about how we listened to our customers and partners around the world and are delivering a solution with their needs in mind. Together we can accomplish great things.

For additional information, visit our Windows MultiPoint Server website. And remember, you can still download and evaluate the Release Candidate today so you’re ready when it’s officially out in March.

Regards,

Dean Paron
Product Unit Manager
Windows MultiPoint Server

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