Reasons to Develop using VMs
When planning any software development project, whether it is a point or enterprise solution, there are several key questions to answer before a line of code is written. How will you know it’ll work on the required operating systems? How can you give the developers a standard development environment without buying or configuring hardware? Once developed, how can it be tested? Virtualization is a simple yet effective way for addressing these critical concerns related to software development environments. Continue Reading
If you’ve worked with virtualization long enough, you may have noticed that performance can degrade over time. This phenomenon is related to 
Virtualization has progressed considerably in the past few years, but graphics performance has been notoriously poor because VMs (virtual machines) have been unable to take advantage of the host’s video card. Even if your workstation has the latest from NVidia, ATI, or some other video card manufacturer, the VM has had no way of taking advantage of the 
When people ask us about SolidWorks Enterprise PDM best practices, we often note how critical it is to have a test environment available for critical business systems that matches the production environment. A test environment allows you to validate patches, service packs, version upgrades, and configuration changes in an environment that will not impact production systems. For SolidWorks Enterprise PDM (EPDM), creating a test environment is a very simple process. 
One of the often overlooked features of VMWare Workstation is the Virtual Disk Mapping utility. Available through the standard VMware Workstation GUI, the tool maps a Windows drive letter to a virtual disk used in a VM. Mapping a virtual disk can be done much quicker and easier than launching the VM to access the files on the virtual machine’s disks. This functionality ships with VMware Workstation for Windows; other tools are available for Linux users, but won’t be covered in this article. 
If you have edited a Microsoft Office document that resides in SharePoint, you have no doubt noticed the Document Information Panel (DIP). From the DIP, you can access the properties of a document as well as check out a checked in document. There are two frequently asked questions about the DIP:
