Jeff Dillon

Application Provisioning
The group I am a developer for at Sun is called N1 Grid Service Provisioning Server. The basic idea is that one master server contains a XML based description of all the software components that need to be installed on other systems. This master server is able to deploy these applications to other systems on a network. This allows for all the software to be managed from a central console. The product currently supports Solaris, Windows, AIX, and Linux.

The interesting thing for me is that while working at InstallShield, we always talked about doing this with our Java product. We continually had customers asking for this kind of functionality. However, the complexity of the project seemed too high with our already busy schedule. InstallShield was always focued on the world of a single machine.

The ability to manage software across many machines is a very powerful concept. It is very cool to be able to now work on a project which I have been thinking about for a couple years.