This is a bit outside of Technologizer’s bread-and-butter coverage, but if I worked in a company of any size I’d be excited about it: Vmware is launching Horizon App Manager, a (mostly) cloud-based service that lets companies manage the cloud-based services. It allows them to set up a dashboard for the folks in the organization that looks a bit like the home screen on an iPhone or Android phone, with icons for Web-based apps used by the company (along with ones for more personal services such as Facebook, if the company desires). The cool part is that it uses technologies such as the OAuth and SAML standards to automate logging into the services; once you’ve signed into App Manager, you can then click through to services without having to log in again. Behind the scenes, it lets IT people do administrative such as like sign large numbers of people up for a cloud service in automated fashion and delete accounts for employees who have left the organization.
I have memories from my days as a worker bee of having no idea how to find or get into services such as ADP’s online portal (shown above). And of discovering that the person who’d set us up with a particular service had left the company before anyone remembered to ask him or her about how to administer it. As a lover of Web services, it’s heartening to see them matter enough that outfits such as VMware are turning their attention to them.
Was it really only a little over three years ago that the formerly fanciful notion of being able to run Windows apps within OS X without major limitations