What type of dumb terminal? [closed]

Question

Question:

What type of dumb terminal should I get for a 100 user environment? Or is a dumb terminal not cut out for the following requirements?

User software requirements:

1. Internet access
2. Microsoft Office
3. Microsoft SharePoint
4. Microsoft Dynamics
5. Adobe Photoshop
6. Visual Studio

I.T. requirements

1. Central management of all users
2. Central management of all software installations and updates

General requirements

1. Users should be able to continue to work if they lose internet connection to the servers or if the servers go down for whatever reason. In some form of offline mode, where their work gets sync'ed back to the servers as soon as connectivity is returned.

2. Users should be able to be portable, i.e. they should be able to work from home, or from there car, or on a beech, or in the office at their desk, or even at someone else's desk.

3. I understand that thin clients, disk-less clients exist, but I am not sure which type of dumb terminal will allow the above. Or even, if the above is possible at all using dumb terminals.

4. A smooth desktop like user experience.

Current environment:

We currently have full desktop's to RDS into a full desktop sessions generated on a server. It seems all that desktop power is being wasted by simply getting the desktops to connect to an RDS session. When running the same apps on the desktop, the user experience is a lot more pleasurable than the user experience of the same applications over RDS.

Answer 1

What you want cannot be done with dumb terminals because a dumb terminal is something that is meant to be in a fixed location and requires a network connection all the time to work.

That basically means you will need a Rich client.

Given you mention portability, a laptop is most likely going to be your best bet.

A laptop can be carried everywhere and files can be accessible through various means, such as dropbox or a VPN connection. In addition, network shares can be configured to work offline in the case that when the connection is dropped, the files remain available and is synced back when the connection is restored, but this is not the best option. In my opinion dropbox or similar services will work best for this reason, but if centralized rights is a requirements, then network shares with offline files is the way to go, optionally using VPN.

A desktop can also be used, but its not that mobile. That said, you can use both laptops and desktops at the same time. Users can have a roaming profile and be able to work on any desktop, or have their own laptop if they also need to be outside with it.

Answer 2

The biggest problem with your requirements is the requirement of being able to work with intermittent Internet. That alone means that you have to use a full PC for each user. The fact that all users must have simultaneously available Office, SharePoint, Dynamics, Photoshop, and Visual Studio means that you can't use cheap PCs.

If you allow the constant Internet connection requirement, then Remote Desktop Services (formerly called Terminal Services) becomes a good option.

If your requirements weren't application-based, that is, if some workers can do some work entirely within browsers, then they can use ChromeBooks or very locked-down generic Windows PCs. Some call centers work this way.