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After reading the article “Thin Clients II: The Comeback” (“Thin Is In,” May 8), I have to chuckle. Being a Citrix/Terminal Services administrator, I agree with the philosophy of thin clients. However, administrators need to think twice before jumping to such a system. Two problems always seem to come up: poor application design and inadequate network design.
Even a small company runs several applications, many of which were never designed for a thin-client/Terminal Services environment. Graphic-intensive applications, softphones or any application that works based upon user hardware information essentially requires that the user has a traditional PC.
On the network side, many things must be in order before thin clients will work correctly. Often, scripting skills are needed for the final user tweaks, including printer installations and network drive mappings.
Users are always hesitant about giving up their PCs for small thin clients, and, if the administrators fail on any of the areas above, the users will be right and the “solution” will become a money pit.
Chris Smith
Newport, Ky.