Ask Ben Anything is on a plane to NYC

I'm just about to hop a plane to New York, so Ask Ben Anything will be written in the air and posted this weekend when I get back online.

This week's topic will parallel (pardon the pun) yesterday's Parallels Technology Network announcement and will discuss the value of virtual appliances and discuss deployment scenarios.

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Free virtual appliances from the Parallels Technology Network

In the wee hours of the morning we officially launched the Parallels Technology Network, a major community initiative designed to foster communication between users and developers, and helps users get the best software from all OSes on their machines via free, pre-packaged, community-developed virtual appliances.

For those of you not familiar with virtual appliances, they are basically pre-configured software, optimized to work within an isolated Parallels virtual machine. VAs are self-contained, and ready to use, and don't require any manual setup. Just load the VM in Parallels Workstation or Parallels Desktop for Mac, and you're ready to start working with the software inside the VA...no geekiness required!

There is already a good number of VAs on the site now (my favorites so far are the OpenOffice VA and the Internet Security VA), but we need your help to make this community all that it can be. Check out the PTN and learn more about how to get VAs, how to build your own and submit them to the directory, and how to become part of this cutting-edge, cross-platform community.

For a good overview of what the PTN is, check out Jacqui Cheng's recent Ars Technica article on the subject.

And yes, Jacqui, you can call me Ben in your articles. We're all friends here. :)
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The MacApper Switcher's Giveaway 2007

My friends at MacApper are running a contest to help new Mac users get access to the best software the Mac platform has to offer. Hit up The MacApper Switcher's Giveaway 2007 page and check out all of the great software you can enter to win (yes, Parallels Desktop for Mac is one of them).

All you need to do to enter is share your "switcher's story" about how and why you moved from a PC to a Mac. Submit your entry by emailing it to macapper@gmail.com. If Parallels was a part of your decision to switch, email a copy to me, because I want to hear your story too!
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Ask Ben Anything: What's up with support?

One of the common questions I’m asked about Parallels is “When are you guys going to offer support that’s as good as your products?” I’ve posted here before that we’ve been adding techs like crazy and tweaking some internal processes to make support better, but today, I’m really fired up to let you that some BIG changes to the way Parallels addresses customer support are in the works.

Here’s an overview of what’s happening now, and what you’ll see over the next few weeks:

More Posts from Parallels on the Forum: Parallels engineers and support techs are starting to play a much more active role in the Forum. If you frequent the Forum, you’ve probably already noticed how there are a lot more posts from our team answering questions, making suggestions, and offering advice. You can spot us on the Forum (I’m “Ben @ Parallels”) by the orange Parallels logo that accompanies our screen names.

In that vein, let me send out a huge “THANK YOU” to everyone our enthusiastic, rabidly loyal users who devote time every week to answering questions and offering guidance on the Forum. You're a big part of why the forum is so popular and so valuable.

How-to Tutorials: Our support team is building a series of short, “How-to” articles that will walk users through some of the most common tasks in Parallels products, like using the Installation Assistant, Running Compressor, Connecting USB devices and more, and offer some tips and tricks from the techs. These will be available on the site as individually downloadable PDFs and will be a great supplement to the user manual. Look for these to go live in about 2 weeks.

The Knowledge Base: Even though this is still being built, we’ve already updated the FAQ section of the website to reflect each week’s top 5 support questions. Check back often to find answers to the most common questions surrounding Parallels products.

Technical Whitepapers: My team and I have compiled a number of technical whitepapers that deep dive into a number of topics, including:

• TCO (total cost of ownership for those of you who don’t speak marketing) of virtualization
• What virtualization technology is and how it works
• Why Intel VT technology is important
• How to best deploy/manage Parallels in the enterprise

They are at editing & design now and will be ready for download (they’re free, of course) very soon.

More Techs and a New Queue System: We’ve totally overhauled both our email and phone support queues, which will help us ensure that everyone gets their question answered in about 24 hours. We’ve also added a number of new tech (everyone say hi to Craig, Tyler, Tracey, Mike, and Dave!) to make sure that we have the bandwidth to help anyone who has a question. These guys are pros and they really know their stuff.

An Even More Responsive Engineering Team: Part of getting our engineers more involved with the forum, documentation and support is so we can ensure that we’re building products that consistently exceed your expectations. Let us know what you love, what you hate, and what you want to see, and we’ll do our best to make it happen. This is one of the main reasons our development cycle is so fast...we don’t want to make you wait for anything!

As always, I can’t say "thank you" enough to everyone who’s been supporting us over the past 2 years and has borne with us as we worked through our growing pains.


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Parallels: Multi-OS Powerhouse

Parallels is part of this month's cover story in MacWorld Magazine! The article, titled "Four Ways to Windows", covers various solutions for running Windows on a Mac. Parallels Desktop for Mac was named the best solution of the four, with Rob Griffiths (the author) calling us a "Multi-OS Powerhouse" and "...the most-refined option for running a full Windows installation next to OS X on an Intel Mac."

High praise from one of the most respected names in the Mac universe. Check out the whole article here.

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Ask Ben Anything - Coherence tricks

Well, I'm settled here in Seattle so its back to business here at "Ask Ben Anything". This week I received a number of questions about how to make Coherence more usable, so I that's this week's subject. Below are a few of my favorite tricks to make life in Coherence a bit easiers:

1) Load the Task Manager in your Mac Dock. Why? Because if Windows decides to stall or you get that familiar "Application Not Responding" message, you don't have to manually send the keys to force quit or kill the process. Just click the Task Manager and it'll open right up. You can also shut down from there.

2) Right click to select one of multiple documents. Since in Coherence there's no taskbar (unless you want to see it, of course), you'll find that if you have multiple Excel sheets (or Word docs, or PowerPoint presentations, or whatever), you can't just click the taskbar and select the one you want. You can, however, right click the program icon in your dock and then select the file you want. Just as easy as using the taskbar, just with less blue on your screen.

3) Boot straight into Coherence mode by changing your boot options in Configuratino Editor -> Booting tab -> Startup Mode pulldown menu. Whenver you start your VM (or click on a Windows app with Parallels off), Windows will boot silently and invisibly straight into Coherence.

I hope these tips help you as much as they help me!
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Intalling OS/2 Warp in a Parallels virtual machine

If you're familiar with Parallels, chances are that you know us as the company that lets you run Windows in a virtual machine on a Mac. But did you know that both Parallels Desktop for Mac and Parallels Workstation 2.2 lets you run almost ANY operating system in a virtual machine, including every version of Windows (3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Vista), any Linux distibution, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OS/2, eComStation, Sun Solaris, and even MS DOS?

Out of the "other" OSes that you can run in Parallels virtualization products, one of the most common is OS/2 Warp. Even though its old, its rock solid and is still used by millions of businesses (many in the financial space) every day. In that regard, I thought I'd share how how to get OS/2 Warp 4.5 (the most commonly used version of OS/2) installed in a Parallels virtual machine. Please note that I most recently went through this process in Parallels Desktop for Mac build 3188:

1. Create .iso images of your OS/2 install disks. You can do this with the Parallels Image Tool, which is included free with every copy of Desktop and Workstation.
   
2. Create a custom VM. Select OS/2, then select your OS Version as "OS/2 Warp 4.5"
3. Connect warp_452_install.iso to your VM
4. When the initial VM setup is complete, press Ctrl-Alt-Delete (or go to Actions -> send keys -> Ctrl-Alt-Delete), and when you see the frozen “Boot from hard drive ...” message, hard stop your VM.
5. Go to Configuration Editor, change CD image to warp_452_install.iso, and change the Boot Sequence to “CD-ROM, Hard Disk, Floppy”. Restart your VM.
6. After installation is complete, change the Boot Sequence back to “Hard Disk, CD-ROM, Floppy”.
   

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