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

PART III

This is the final blog in my three part series about the advantages of Terminal Services. Check out the final reason below.

3. Central Management – Now this sounds great and all, but it sounds like a pain to manage! Think about it this way, would you rather troubleshoot 100 workstations with all kinds of weird apps that users might install, or would you rather troubleshoot one server, where the admin has control over what app goes where. I know from personal experience that it’s always easier to fix a problem when you know what you have installed on your computer/server so you can back track. You never know what a user might put on their workstation, and that’s reason enough to consider this kind of solution. But it can still sound like a daunting task to ensure you have a Terminal Server set up properly and that all your users are getting their applications on their session desktops, and all printers and driver mappings are set up correctly etc. Once again this is where 3rd party apps can save the day, with apps like Simplify Suite, you can lockdown your users session desktop to the point where they can’t launch apps unless you say they are allowed to launch an app, distribute your network printers to objects within your AD with ease, or even build user’s session desktops with all their apps at their fingertips.

Ultimately what I’m trying to say is that there are plenty of ways to make things easier when trying to manage users and their work environment. From my point of view, Terminal Services really makes it easy for you. It eliminates the need to spend a great deal of money on beefed up workstations, all you’d need is a basic XP workstation or even a thin client that can simply connect to a server. Terminal Services also cuts down on user error because you, the admin, manage everything on the Terminal Server. I think the reasons I’ve listed in this series should be considered when thinking about a solution for your environment. Now, of course no solution is the “be all end all” solution; all solutions have their problems. However, based on my experience working with Terminal Services and helping support Terminal Servers that utilize triCerat products, I’ve seen firsthand how much easier Terminal Services has made the lives of admins everywhere. I know that sounds a little cliché, but hey, it’s true!