Here is a breakdown of the main pros of Microsoft Terminal
Services for Windows 2000.
Simplified Management
Terminal Services includes a remote control ability that allows
you to take over one terminal session from another session.
This allows you to connect to the server from your own workstation
and access another users desktop to help fix any problems he has or
to show him how to do things.
Since all the users are logged onto a single machine software
installation and upgrades are only needed at one place. This
will greatly reduce the amount of time you need to keep all your
main programs up to date for all your users, and free you up to do
other maintenance and upgrades that are needed.
Reuse low end hardware
The client requirements for Terminal Services are either a
hardware based Thin Client usually running Windows CE or a PC
running Windows 3.11 or higher. These requirements allows you
to reuse your aging 386’s, 486’s and lower end pentium’s as simple
thin clients running either Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 until they
are no longer operational. You also need very little hard
drive space. I am using our old 200MB drives with plenty of
free space.
If you have any of this older hardware Terminal Services is a
great way to get the maximum value for it possible.
Minimal effort on Client
Installs
PC
Installing the Terminal Services Client is a very
simple procedure. First you install your base operating system
(Windows 3.11 or 95) and set it up to be able to connect to your
server, and then you install the client software. The
configuration involves selecting the name of the server and the
screen resolution to use. After that you are ready to use the
client. I usually put a shortcut into the startup folder for
the session I want the user to be using.
Hardware Based Terminal
These units are even easier to set up than the PC
based solution. All you need to do is tell it what the address
of the server it needs to connect to is and whether to autostart the
session.
Quick Replacement of Clients
Since terminal clients are so easy to set up and all the data is
stored on the server, replacement units only take a matter of
minutes to setup and put in place. I even keep a spare thin
client on hand in case any of our Full PC’s break down I can put a
thin client in place while doing repairs or upgrades.
Overall Network Load will be less
The only traffic traveling to and from the terminal server is the
GUI display and the keystrokes. This greatly reduces the
demands on the network over having the full data from Word or Excel
Documents. I have been using a thin client to connect to our
network from my house over our VPN connection without any problems
with bandwidth. I am also in the process of setting up one
site with 5 thin clients running over a 56K line to the Terminal
Server and all our preliminary tests show that there will be an
improvement of performance getting files from the head office and
from the Email server in Head Office