Windows 8 information has been few and far between since a big leak of PowerPoint documents earlier this year. New slides have surfaced today that describe Microsoft’s vision for Desktop as a Service (DaaS) in the next operating system.

Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet unearthed the slides thanks to a french blogger at ma-config.com. The slide deck is from a Microsoft architectural summit held in London earlier this year. One slide calls out “Windows Next” as 2012+. Microsoft employees typically refer to the next version of Windows as Next or vNext. The presentation describes the future of Windows in terms of virtualization technologies.

Microsoft has a number of virtual technologies including virtual desktops (VDI), application virtualization through App-V, OS virtulization using Remote Desktop and Terminal Services, data virtualization through folder redirection and synch and also hardware virtualization using Hyper-V. Microsoft describes the new DaaS method as a separation of the operating system from the device. Jason Heyes, a solution architect at Microsoft, held the talk and described the next version of Windows with Desktop as a Service as “the virtual OS. That final step of pulling the OS away from the device.”

DaaS will allow for desktops to be part of a portal which surfaces users apps, data, state, authorisation and access to make them more centrally managed. All applications and their associated data are “treated as cached entities and synchronized with an appstore and “user state store,” according to the slide deck. The concept backs up earlier leaks of a Windows Application store which Microsoft referenced in Windows 7 slides.

Microsoft is currently in the planning and preparation stage for Windows 8. The software giant is expected to share more information and beta bits next year. Steve Ballmer has described the next release of Windows as the company’s “riskiest product bet”. It is understood that Microsoft will feature deep cloud integration into the future OS to realise its vision of “three screens and a cloud”. Microsoft’s Dutch PR team posted in October that Microsoft was “on course for the next version of Windows” and that it would take around “two years before Windows 8 is on the market“.