Windows MultiPoint Server 2010

Microsoft today announced a new member of the Windows Server team called Windows MultiPoint Server 2010. Aimed at educational institutions, MultiPoint appears to be, in many ways, a successor to Windows SteadyState, which won't be made available in a Windows 7 version. Here's the news.

Microsoft today announced the release of Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, a new Windows product that increases access to affordable computing in educational scenarios such as classrooms, labs and libraries by allowing multiple users to simultaneously share one computer using multiple screens. Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 is now globally available to OEMs and will be rolling out to Microsoft academic volume licensing customers on March 1. In addition, Microsoft is announcing new partnerships that create a strong global ecosystem of hardware companies that give customers a breadth of choices to buy and use Windows MultiPoint Server solutions.

"We heard clearly from our customers in education that to help fulfill the amazing promise of technology in the classroom, they needed access to affordable computing that was easy to manage and use," said Anthony Salcito, vice president of worldwide education at Microsoft. "That's why we developed Windows MultiPoint Server — a solution that meets these needs and delivers an up-to-date, trusted Windows experience."

Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 is an operating system that enables multiple people to connect to a single host computer with their own monitor, keyboard and mouse through USB or a video card. Each person individually controls his or her own station with an independent and familiar Windows computing experience. Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 is the flagship product in a family of shared resource computing technologies, the MultiPoint solutions, which provide teachers and students with greater access to educational technology. Shared resource computing is an emerging category that allows a customer to tap into more of a computer’s capability to enable a single host computer to support multiple users simultaneously.

More information on how to buy Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 and the Windows MultiPoint family of solutions is available at the Microsoft web site.

Discuss this Article 3

rkbrente
on Feb 24, 2010
Is there any chance this could be adapted for home use? I could see this being used for simple home settings (meaning, non-gaming).
jtdennis
on Feb 24, 2010
I don't think it has much to do with SteadyState. I saw a presentation on a product using this and it's more like a return to a dumb-terminal solution. This product I saw had up to 10 small boxes that the monitor, keyboard, and mouse plug into. That plugs into a small server via USB. We're looking at it for a lab situation.
Waethorn
on Feb 24, 2010
"Is there any chance this could be adapted for home use? I could see this being used for simple home settings (meaning, non-gaming)." Not likely. This requires a fairly high-end server system to manage all of the user consoles. Plus, OEM's are designing systems based around the concept of a USB port replicator (like a laptop docking station without the dock connector) where video is streamed over USB with your CPU doing a lot of the work (USB doesn't have the bandwidth to much with video - maybe USB 3.0 stuff will catch up to this in a few years). To connect up to 10 computers to a single OEM box would require multiple USB 2.0 controllers to keep video bandwidth in check. Since all the computing is done on a single box, the CPU would have to be multi-core. If you had even 4 consoles trying to do any kind of video streaming, that requires some pretty good thread management right thar. Anyway, you won't see this for home use. Home PC's are in a market where it's more accepted to sell you as many low-end PC's as you want, rather than consolidating them. Workload consolidation through virtualization isn't home user-friendly at this stage in the game.

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