Virtual PC image expiring in 3 weeks!

Posted by Mike Snyder on June 9, 2007  |  Comments (2)

For those of you that use the Microsoft CRM Virtual PC image provided by Microsoft, I want to remind you that the image will expire 3 weeks from today on June 30th! By expire, I mean it will stop working. I heard some rumors that Microsoft is working on a new Virtual PC Image ("VPC") with Office 2007 on it but I don't know a lot of details about it. I assume (hope) that Microsoft will release the new VPC before the original one expires, so I expect we'll see it soon. If not, there will be a lot of sad Microsoft CRM sales people out there on July 1st because they won't have any software to demo.

The expiring VPC image isn't a critical issue for us at Sonoma Partners because we build our own Microsoft CRM demo VPC's. We build our own demo images for two main reasons:

1. We want to demo with Office 2007 (on a clean Office install instead of an upgrade from Office 2003).
2. We want a streamlined and fast VPC image and we don't need all the extra stuff that Microsoft includes on theirs. Our image has just the bare bones installed on it and it is only 6 GB in file size. For comparison, the Microsoft VPC is over 10 GB.

With that said, we'll definitely check out the new VPC from Microsoft when it arrives.