Terminal Services and you: 3 reasons why you should be on the bandwagon

PART I

This is the first of a three part blog series I will be writing for your reading pleasure. This series will cover why you should be taking advantage of Terminal Services. Obviously this is just my personal opinion, and chances are if you’re on our website reading our blogs, you’re already taking advantage of this type of setup. But hey, maybe you’re just doing some research on Terminal Services and your company is considering the switch, and perhaps these three reasons will put you “over the edge”.  

       Scalability – In my mind this is the number one reason to consider a Terminal Services environment. With this kind of setup as we all know, users simply log on to a Terminal Server to do their daily work tasks and admins have the ability to house several hundred or even thousands of users on a (depending on specs). When more users are added to a network, maybe through an acquisition or some hiring push, who wants to have to setup a whole bunch of user workstations? Why not build a basic Windows XP desktop or thin client and grant users access to a Terminal Server that uses a mandatory profile setup? That way when your users log on to the server they’ll have all their assigned apps and tools already in place. It is usually much easier to add one server to house hundreds users than it is to set up 100 different workstations.

Now, with scaling capabilities come problems! The bigger the environment expands, the more variables you have to account for. For an example, let’s look at printing. You might have a Terminal Server that remote employees use by logging in via VPN. Well, that can cause one big printing issue because you’d have to install their printer drivers on your server in order to properly bring over their printers into their sessions so they have full functionality. Well, who wants to do that, right? I mean, there are thousands of printers out there. In this case, this is where a 3^rd party application could come in handy. Take ScrewDrivers for instance and its ability to virtualize print drivers in user sessions. Problem solved! So this is one great reason to pick a Terminal Services solution. There are a couple more reasons I want to talk about, so keep a look out for my next blog!