Put our school on a thin-client system?

Hello all, I'm wondering if anyone has experience with a thin-client, windows-based system in their school. Opinions? Experiences good and bad? I'm working with an academy in Thailand that includes K-12 International Baccalaureate school (growing to 250 employees across the organization, plus 700 students in the school). We're selecting our IT system and any opinions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you! Warmly,
Nick

Tags: Hardware, IT, ThinClient

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Permalink Reply by Dave Peterson on December 31, 2009 at 1:50pm

Nick;

The use of thin client (or more appropriately - server based) computing is an excellent way to extend resources and to devise a "sustainable technology refresh schedule". You run all applications on the "server" and the thin client devices themselves are simply ways to "show" what is happening in the "session" on the server. You don't replace the little thin client devices except when they fail. When the server slows down or is not capable of running the newest, fastest, bestest applications, you simply replace the server.

That is the theory, and it works well in environments that don't require lots of diverse or high powered applications. It is also necessary to be able to closely control what is loaded and running on the server so it tends to make it a fairly high intensity tech support proposition, unless the user is willing to use what you give them and not ask for new applications or changes very often. That being said, most people think that schools don't use high powered applications, but things like Reader Rabbit, and MovieMaker, and Compass, use a lot of resources, so server based computing doesn't tend to work well for them. Also, many school applications are licensed on a per PC basis and don't run well in a server based environment. That is not to say that the data can't be saved on the server. What I am saying is that the applications don't run well for these on the server, they must run on the PC in order to work. Keep in mind that nothing runs on the PC in a server based thin client environment. That knocks the wheels right off server based computing. The last thing is multimedia. Since the applications all run on the server and the thin clients only are used to "show" the screen, multimedia is sent via the network and it tends to run very choppily. It doesn't look good!

So, all in all, thin clients run very well if you are using any kind of multimedia, lot's of applications are not going to run well, and you really must test every application before rolling it out.

You might want to check Fiddlehead. It gives the benefits of server based computing, but has none of the disadvantages. www.myfiddlehead.com