Patent ID: 7117448

Claim:
A method of selecting applications that are allowed to be executed by a user of a computer system, said method comprising: booting an operating system on the computer system; loading a virtual machine middleware application on the operating system, wherein the virtual machine middleware application is adapted to run platform-neutral applications; receiving a user identifier corresponding to the user; receiving a computer system identifier corresponding to the computer system; matching one or more applications that are allowed to be executed by both the user identifier and the computer system identifier; and enabling the matched applications to be invoked from the computer system, wherein the enabling further includes: invoking a desktop shell application in the virtual machine middleware application, the desktop shell including a desktop window that includes one or more container windows; receiving one or more self-contained desktops, each of which includes one or more of the matched applications, from a server connected to the computer system over a computer network; and displaying the matched applications corresponding to at least one of the self-contained desktops in the desktop window.