Getting Started with VM Depot by Doug Mahugh.
From the post:
Do you need to deploy a popular OSS package on a Windows Azure virtual machine, but don’t know where to start? Or do you have a favorite OSS configuration that you’d like to make available for others to deploy easily? If so, the new VM Depot community portal from Microsoft Open Technologies is just what you need. VM Depot is a community-driven catalog of preconfigured operating systems, applications, and development stacks that can easily be deployed on Windows Azure.
You can learn more about VM Depot in the announcement from Gianugo Rabellino over on Port 25 today. In this post, we’re going to cover the basics of how to use VM Depot, so that you can get started right away.
Doug outlines simple steps to get you rolling with the VM Depot.
Sounds a lot easier than trying to walk casual computer users through installation and configuration of software. I assume you could even load data onto the VMs.
Users just need to fire up the VM and they have the interface and data they want.
Sounds like a nice way to distribute topic map based information systems.