by Don Burnett
Microsoft has released the Expression Professional Subscription program. The package gives you the following products..
- Expression Studio
- Visual Studio Standard Edition
- Office Standard Edition
- Office Visio Professional
- Windows XP
- Windows Vista Business Edition
- Virtual PC
- Pre-configured virtualized server environments..
COST: The Expression Professional Subscription will be available for purchase in the first half of 2008 for US$999 ERP.
REVIEW: There are a few "gotchas" here that you need to know about, but this is a great value proposition for your designers..
Okay let's talk about the what you gets and the why's...
Expression Studio- (Does this include updates to 2.0 and later if they are released in your subscription year? I'd expect so but don't quote me on that.)
Visual Studio Standard- Because you probably need to get into it even if you don't code in it so you can share projects.. (Looks like no version control with this package, that question is still up in the air?).
Office Visio Professional- This is a great tool for diagramming things including work flows and processes.. I believe there is a 3rd party XAML exporter for it already. This is a great tool that most interaction designers use already.
Windows XP- No doubt for backward compatibility testing. Remember WPF and Silverlight applications run on XP, it just doesn't have any hardware acceleration for XP's graphics.
Windows Vista Business Edition- Now this is a little confusing to me as to why they included the Business SKU of Vista. There are several things missing from it as a designer that you'll want, including MPEG-2 dvd playback. There is no MEDIA CENTER functions built into this version and it doesn't playback all compressed data types like Mpeg-2..
With this edition you'll have to buy this separately from 3rd party vendors. Vista Business is not the best solution because it limits the playable/encode capable datatypes without buying more encoding software.
Also if you are developing a XAML based Media Center application here you are out of luck because it comes with NO built-in Media Center. You'll have to upgrade to ultimate anyway.
Virtual PC- Again some people use this but I hear it has some issues with WPF 3D. I know some agency folks who have Macs who run a virtual Windows PC, but this is not what this is. It's virtual PC for the PC. Which lets you create "separate" virtual environments to work from and test with. They are supposed to include pre-made images to get you working and testing. It's very obvious that one of the developer guys decided on this addition to the subscription. I am not sure if developers really understand how designers test things including designs, even at Microsoft.
Last time I had heard however that Virtual PC doesn't implement the latest DirectX, so if you use this to develop applications you probably won't be getting full speed or hardware accelerated graphics to develop your WPF graphics on. I am not sure WPF 3D works either in this configuration completely either.. Survey says "great idea", not ideal implementation.
Creating a separate testing and design environment is a good idea, but if you have actually tried to develop with this there are certain "gotchas" there..
Whoever put this subscription idea together, it's a good one, I just think there wasn't enough review of the technical specifications behind it and decisions about what it should include. Of course no one asks me about this kind of thing.. Virtual PC is not something you'll be wanting to test your 2D and 3D animation design on. You won't be able to check accurate Frames Per Second rates and be sure that the screen is updating properly. For a designer that's very important, for a developer *NOT SO MUCH* so please don't test install and use Blend in Virtual PC it's a bad idea for designers.
But if you know all of these things it sounds like a great idea and gives a designer a whole stable of software to work from. Now if they'd just take my suggestion and add Office Live Workspaces to this subscription I'd think they'd have a real winner on their hands.
You can use this free online tool to collaborate with your clients, do art approvals, project tracking all in one free online location. Don't take my word for it though, sign up for it today for free.. That's one thing no one else has or is giving as part of their services free collaboration and project management for your clients. Play on par with your clients as if you were a bigger organization.
Overall Impressions:
All in all it's a great value for a business wanting to equip their designers.. I would like to see them expand this kit with discount coupons for third party products like Techsmith's Morae Usability testing software. Which would be a great value add to this kit..
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