[THIN] Re: Recommendations for Thin client devices
- From: "Steve Greenberg" <steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 12:47:29 -0700
Exactly, well stated. There is also the danger if you go down the road to
create a managed, full featured XPe thin client that you need to patch and
provide virus protection, etc, etc.
You can easily end up re-creating the fat PC with added limitations!
Steve Greenberg
Thin Client Computing
34522 N. Scottsdale Rd D8453
Scottsdale, AZ 85262
(602) 432-8649
www.thinclient.net
steveg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----Original Message-----
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of John Vorchak
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 12:34 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: Recommendations for Thin client devices
Good points for sure, the XPE, just as now CE clients are vulnerable - not
very, but still a risk. There are ways to mitigate the risk however I'm
sorry to say that I'm not aware of one of the thin client vendors who is
making this happen...
The biggest problem continues to be exactly what you are going after
however, and that is the management - the vendors realize this and build
custom tools to be able to 'easily' manage the XPE devices however the tools
fall far short of what they should be. Realistically there's a dirty little
secret that the vendors could use in their construction of the image - MS
provides the SMS Advanced Client for XPE... The bad news, you have to
include it in the build at image development time, so since the vendors are
wrapping themselves into the custom management piece they're not going to do
it, plus most of them know their tools well and are unfamiliar with SMS.
Back when I last developed a thin client platform, we used Altiris for
management, it was a good solution and one of the current vendors should get
the hint -- possibly from a large account customer (hint, hint) -- to build
an image that can be managed by something more reasonable than a custom tool
that is typically late and falls short of expectations. I realize that I'm
not making the Wyse guys and others happy with talking about the SMS
component, but I know of industrial customers who are now using it daily so
the vendors can get evolve or die as far as I'm concerned :)
It does really come down to an informed decision realistically, I prefer
XPE, but that's because as an XPE developer, I'm pretty involved with XPE.
Preference sometimes doesn't dictate over business need however and if a
device is not able to be managed, it's an ugly paperweight/coffee warmer and
pc's end up ruling the day.
My $0.02....
John
-----Original Message-----
From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Michael Pardee
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 1:47 PM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: Recommendations for Thin client devices
We have 4500 thin clients and I struggle with staying with them as we
continue to grow (we use CE based clients, almost entirely due to cost) or
return to fat clients. For me the keys are performance and management.
With the Xpe thin clients I believe we still have to deal with patching and
viruses. If nothing else I would expect they can help spread a worm.
With CE we haven't had the same concerns. We have old NCDs, and a bunch of
Neowares. We are about to evaluate the Wyse as well. But there is
something compelling about a fat client managed by SMS and locked down by
GPO that is appealing to me. We have much more control over PCs that we did
7 years ago.
Although, I could just feel this way because we got burned badly by the new
DST rules and the NCD thin clients. They are so old that there were no
patches for them so we had to trick their time zone information to make the
time and their Outlook calendars look correct. This Sunday we'll have to
move them back to the correct time zones since 4/1 is the date of the
original DST change. With PCs we could have figured something out. With
the WinCE based NCDs we have to either get 1700 of them out of here or plan
on changing their time zone information 4 times a year.
When it comes to the thin clients the best management tool will win with us
since every vendor has a model that will perform acceptably. NCD had a
decent solution in their time but they're gone. Neoware has a fair solution
but it has not scaled well for us. They have a new version that is
promising the world but we'll see in a couple of weeks when we have it.
They are very late with the delivery. Maybe the Wyse tool will blow the
others away and make the decision easy.
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