Desktop as a Service (DaaS)

[abrigham]

There is some movement in the Desktop as a Service moving from corporate into EDU. What are you thoughts? Do you think it would work?

What challenges and road blocks will it throw up?

Do you support a change from a Cap-Ex model to subscription based?

 

 

Looking forward to all your opinions.

[Ephelyon]

There's an example of such a service being offered as an explicit package, by Novus Group, here:

 

MySchool Desktop

[pow]

That looks purely shocking, Windows 7 (out of date), 1GB per teacher storage (laughable) and the website looks... errr... interesting?

[Ephelyon]

Never said I was endorsing it...

 

Just an example I know of because they're a managed service provider in my local area who offer quite a lot of services, to both corporate and schools, but more and more to schools, and are now also offering this particular service as a standalone fully-managed package (I think), so I felt it was relevant to the question asked.

[Garacesh]

VDI's on-paper are a great way of keeping old, sluggish machines 'working', but I can't see an implementation like MySchool Desktop being worthwhile before College because kids simply don't care about school outside of school (and half of em don't care inside school too)

 

I can imagine college kids signing in and working from home at night/weekends instead of trawling around with USB's, but in the same vein, I can also imagine college kids would get along fine with just a USB, especially if it's only offering them 500MB storage. If they can connect to this VDI from home they have their own internet and their own PC. In this world of FOSS operating systems (Ubuntu, Mint, etc) and software (LibreOffice, VLC, paint.net, OpenShot and Blender should get you through just about any course you can shake a stick at) and when you incorporate free systems that can work as VLE's like G Suite or Office 365.. Aren't you just adding in another layer of complication where it isn't needed?

 

We did, for a short spell, replace the shell of some of our older machines from explorer.exe to an RDP software (I think it was Citrix..) and ran them using on-side VDI's, but the response wasn't positive and since W10 we haven't had to do that. I think that kind of approach can work in-school but in the grand scale of things, I don't see why Desktop as a Service needs to be a thing.

[Ephelyon]

I don't know... we had a comprehensive RDP platform available at my last school, which could be used both internally and externally, with beasty VM resources assigned so it could handle the demand. I used to see kids (and staff) on it all the time when I was working out-of-hours. Didn't bother with Citrix or VDI per se as we didn't need them - RDP alone was enough for the job.

 

I think all schools ought to have such a remote access facility available so students and staff have the option to work from home if they choose to, but I'm not suggesting it should have to be plugged relentlessly to all users.

[Garacesh]

Cultural difference, then. We do have VDI's for the staff* and they get used fairly frequently, but that's mostly for SIMS and/or 4Matrix, and once we have RemoteApps set up we expect that staff VDI usage will drop off considerably.

 

It's certainly not something the vast majority of our kids would bother with, and since our kids have both G Suite and Office 365, plus are able to use USB storage, there's no issue with them moving files between school and home. I've tried to keep kids using freeware where possible (Blumind, VLC, Audacity, Paint.Net, Google Earth, Foxit, etc) so that the ones that do want to can use the same programs at home, but we don't offer them any form of remote solution and none of them have ever asked.

 

* Well, we have VDI's, or the ability to remote through to a specific machine. Most staff choose the latter, but I'm lumping the stats together because functionally speaking they're both the same to end-users, 'school network from home'.

[Ephelyon]

Yeah, it was RemoteApp we were using, but with a Full Desktop option as well.

 

We also never really had a proper VLE in place, so this is was of a replacement. That said, I'd definitely prefer to move more remote working over to a VLE-style approach than taking up resources on an RDS Session Host... though if we'd managed to implement a VLE successfully it doesn't mean I'd have taken the RDS solution away as it was already there.

[jmak]

There's a school near us using Airhead 360:

 

https://blog.airhead.io/meet-airhead-360/

 

Airhead is the Bett award-winning cloud desktop that allows staff, students and parents to discover, use and share the very best the Web has to offer.Now Airhead360brings you Windows applications in your browser too![/Quote]

 

Runs in a browser and avoids the need to have servers on site too!

[Ephelyon]

Any servers at all?!

 

That's the way the marketing's written but I find that difficult to imagine...