neilfs

Terminal Services and Citrix are really almost the same thing, however Citrix gives you more bells and whistles and is far more efficient. Many people get hung up on the 'large' cost of Citrix licences, but when you factor in the hardware cost savings, installation cost savings it all levels out with an equal fat-client solution. A school can start with Terminal Services to save cost initially, but will quickly want to add Citrix XenApp to make the thin-client system faster and to support multiple servers properly. Running a Terminal Services only installation to test the effectiveness of thin-clients could be counter productive as Terminal Services will provide a functioning system but it won't turn heads in terms of graphics performance and sound - it would be a great shame if such a school decided not to go further with thin-clients as a result. Typically 40 clients per server, the server should be a good specification, however having a larger number of reasonable servers is better than a small number of very powerful servers, a specialist supplier such as ourselves would provide this consultancy and it is critical it is right to ensure the network performs as required and may factor in using XenServer also. You want to get to having more than one server as quickly as possible, this then provides redundancy should a server fail. Server hardware should be carefully selected, some server brands perform poorly (even though the specifications in terms of memory and processors are comparable) and can produce a noticeable reduction in speed for the end user. Software doesn't tend to freeze, software won't perform or behave any differently to fat-client systems. If you have certain software which freezes that could illustrate a fault with that software and running it on thin-clients won't fix that. Thin-Clients are not suited to software which demands high performance sound and graphics. What we suggest is make savings by using thin-clients for the majority of your suites and then with the savings made there go out and build a high end suite of computers, printers etc and do the graphics and sound in luxary. Our older systems which are due to be refreshed with faster server hardware have started to struggle with some Flash based web-sites, oddly some very complex Flash applications have very little impact on the servers, however others take a large amount of processor time per session - anyone can write poor software which uses more processor time and memory than it needs to, and this seems to be reasonably common with Flash based code. Luckily multiple core processor servers are common place and that has helped reduce/remove the effects of such problem Flash code. Initial installation of a whole new system, ie new servers, new clients, monitors etc including licences and installation (ie all engineer time/support etc) is roughly equal to the purchase cost of new PC systems and a suitable number of servers for a typical PC system. Retaining fat-clients that would need to be replaced but instead are being retained to run as thin-clients is far far cheaper and then allows a school to start a rolling replacement of the old clients with new smaller, quieter thin-clients. This is an ideal solution for a school having to replace a large number of old PC systems. On going support costs are much reduced, repairs in the classroom can be cut down to simply swapping out a client within five minutes and client failures are less common. The real time savings are with software and configuration management - this can be done entirely remotely and so a school can if they wish delegate support to an external company such as ours. We have many reference sites around the UK, mostly in the South, Midlands and Cambridgeshire. It is worth seeing one in action, and getting proper consultancy, we've had to repair many poor installations over the years by both keen technicians and more worryingly competitors, so do look at reference sites who have been running with a supplier for several years.

Yes, I appreciate that, sorry my question must not have been clear... how do I change the installed applications behavour so it looks somewhere else, ie a mapped drive such as u:\ and how do I alter the default settings so each new set-up points to the resources which are located on a shared drive? I don't want it looking in My Documents. I used mandatory, shared profile for all users. Any unique data has to be stored within the users area which is a shared drive, mapped to drive U. Thanks.

I'm just Googling for this issue and from what I can see it appears to use all sorts of non-standard places to store user data, which is fine if you take a Windows PC out of the box and do little to secure it, or the users each have their own computer - but in schools staff/students typically need to move between machines and expect their settings to move with them. Their documentation suggests you place all the resources in a central location, however the settings seem to get stored outside of the registry data within a user profile. I normally configure things to provide a single mandatory profile shared by all users, this in this instance with this software is causing more issues, but equally why would I want to configure this manually for each and every user! That would be silly. The documents I have found refer to a path \My Documents\... Well that isn't a path, I assume it is simply dumping it's setting.ini file within My Documents itself, luckily you can change those paths but what I cannot work out is other than in the registry where does it look for its default settings? Has anyone got a document on network installs of ActivPrimary3? Or am I going to have to resort to loading in registry hacks during the login script? Anyone cracked this?