U3 makes anywhere home

Walking programs could usher in a new way for office and mobile workers to use computers, major USB-drive manufacturers believe. The idea is to install your favourite programs, complete with configurations, onto a flash drive so you can literally plug your personal workspace into any computer.

Flash-drive specialists Sandisk and M-Systems set up a company called U3 last year to develop the technology and promote it as a standard. The drives can be made by any manufacturer but they will all carry the U3 logo.

Like many simple ideas in IT, U3 technology is tricky to implement and has ramifications beyond the immediately obvious. Most leading software is now sold with product activation – the code is locked for use on a single machine or at most one desktop PC and a notebook.

A U3-enabled drive would let you use a single version of Adobe’s Photoshop, for instance, on any number of machines. The advantage to the user is obvious but some software vendors may fear that, although U3 helps answer complaints about the inflexibility of product activation, it might cut sales by reducing the need for multiple copies.

And the co-operation of software developers is vital because U3 requires a special editions of their products to get round the fact that Windows expects configuration data to be in the host system’s Registry. Applications also commonly scatter their files all over a system.

U3 zips up an application on the USB drive and unpacks the configuration data and code it needs into system memory. A window on the host system provides access to the U3 applications.

Significantly, perhaps, early supporters of the system include anti-virus and security specialists McAfee and Zone Labs.

A U3 drive can be protected by passwords or biometrics and could contain encrypted automatic log-on procedures for company or banking sites, bypassing any rogue code logging keypresses on the host system. But many organisations do not like USB drives being plugged into their systems at all, let alone products running code that could be up to all kinds of deliberate or accidental mischief.

However, new dual-core processors are bringing in virtualisation technology that compartmentalises a PC into what are effectively separate computers, allowing U3 apps to run in ‘quarantine’.

U3 chief executive Kate Purmal admits the technology will need to gain critical market mass to get full developer support. She says Microsoft is looking at the technology for some applications but currently not for Office.

However there is already a third-party U3 application that can pick up Outlook email. And Purmal said: ‘Office products like Word are going to be on just about every PC you use so you don’t need to carry them about. You can just carry your files… your Word documents, say.’

She said there had been an overwhelming response at a recent developers’ meeting. The 32-plus companies already backing U3 include Corel, Mozilla and Cyberlink, Kingston, Checkpoint, Trend Micro, Zone Labs, McAfee, Ulead and Skype. Significantly, perhaps, they include several security company sensing a possible new line of business.

There is no reason in principle that the U3 technology should not be used on portable hard drives, but Purmal quotes a Gartner estimate that within five years the average USB drive will store 16GB.

www.u3.com