Hey guys,

Just a quick post to let you know the person we got for this month’s ‘On the Spot’ section on our monthly newsletter.

It is Art Matin, the new CEO of Softricity. If you do not know Softricity, they are the company behind Softgrid, a product that allows you to stream applications (like Word, Excel, etc - pretty much anything that runs on Windows) to the user PC. With all this magic that happens in background, applications are NEVER installed on the PC (so if you run Word, there is no such thing as C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\…) and the PC remains on its original state (plain patched OS with no apps) what means no performance loss, no application screw up etc.

Amazing stuff and the future for sure. For people out there doing TS/Citrix, this is the perfect add-on for such environments. No more Silos, no more application conflicts and so on. Really impressive.

Check our newsletter this month for some interesting answers we got from Art.

Cheers!

If you want to learn all the nuts and bolts of Terminal Services and Citrix, and at the same time meet the greatest people alive, BriForum is the way to go.

Coming up in three weeks, I would say it is a must for anyone that is serious about Server Based Computing.

This year I will be presenting two sessions:

‘A Hands-On session on MultiLingual User Interface in a TS world’: here I will explain why such widely unknown feature is a must on terminal services deployments and more than that, will SHOW you how to do it and the issues you may find - and how to fix them. If you work for a Canadian company, in the Canadian Government or if you work for a large corporation that needs to address the need for multiple languages being available for your users, this is the session for you. 

‘Load Balancing pure Terminal Services farms: All your options’: here I will go through all the known methods to load balance TSs (hardware, software and built-in stuff) and list the PROs and CONs of each one. No marketing BS. Pure and simple what each method has to offer and their problems. If you are thinking about how to load balance your TSs, this is the place to be.

That is all guys. I hope to see all of you at BriForum this year. And feel free to stop by and bug me. And if you want to bring me some beer, I am all for that.

As I am always working and/or spending time with my family, it is tough to find the extra time needed to test/research what is out there on the TS market. But a couple weeks ago during my trip to Ireland (yes people, I AM available if you need a TS consultant on-site, just contact me! And by the way I charge extremely reasonable rates. ) I had the chance to play with a product that is getting its name out there but still slowly. The product was the Provision Management Framework, Enterprise Edition from Provision Networks.

Before people start shouting and before I say anything about it, I must say I am NOT affiliated to them or to ANY other company and I do not endorse the use of any product; I am simply expressing my views on this product, what I like, what I hate and so on. Simple as that.

So what I like? Well everything, I mean EVERYTHING, that I think it would be useful and would complement terminal services is there. Published apps? Check. Web Interface? Check. Single SignOn? Check. Seamless Windows? Check. SSL Proxy? Check. As you can see, pretty much everything Citrix PS4.0 offers is there. I tried it and most of its features (like the profile management one that does the same as FlexProfiles) and all I can say is I am impressed. If you are looking for something like Citrix, give this a try.

Ok so what I did not like? Well the interface is kind of cumbersome. After you get used to it, ok. But it could be improved for sure. Secondly you cannot have more than one instance of their management console opened! Documentation is poor at this moment (does not cover the whole Framework) but their support is quick. And they do NOT include README files with their hotfixes! They are there on their website but you must download them separately. Please add both to one single download… And finally, the price. US$ 99 is ok but could be better. If they reduce the price a little bit I am sure they will sell way more and make more money at the end.

Some other things will be coming out soon like Virtual IP support, closing the gap even further when compared to Citrix. So, keep an eye on their product!

The other product I have seen last week (but did not have time to play with it yet) is the XPTS 1.2 from WBisoft. Apparently Seamless Windows with Single SignOn and Load Balancing are there. And all this for US$ 235.00 per SERVER! Wow! In a way it reminds me of my own experience when I was heading Terminal-Services.NET. As you probably know I started Terminal-Services.NET back in 2001 and our main goal since day one was to provide easy-to-use yet affordable add-ons for TS. In a way this is the same approach used by WBisoft! I will make sure I try the product and comment on it here. If it does what it says, I see no reason why small companies, with one or two TSs would not use something like this. Impressive on paper. Let’s see on my lab.

Yes, Sun is moving. Oh, not the Sun, but Sun, that computer/software pachyderm company. Finally, after three years since Windows 2003 was released, Sun decided to do something for their Thin Client customers and is working (in Beta at the moment) on their own RDP Client for Solaris.

Although I do think Sun Rays are still a niche out there, they are usually in use at very large customers (read ‘Military’), what means customers using Windows as well. As Microsoft Terminal Services brought Server Based Computing to the masses (yes, it was Microsoft as with the absurd prices Citrix insists on having and with Sun’s ‘do-not-care-about-small-and-medium-customers’ mentality, Server Based Computing would still be a geek/freak thing), everyone and everything now uses RDP (Do you know your Windows Media Center and your XBox/XBox 360 talk using RDP?).

Sun finally did something for their poor customers used to live with the half usable RDesktop that as of today, with RDP6 out there in the wild, does not even support RDP5.2 properly. So kudos for Sun for doing something decent for their customers (although three years late…)!

I know my friend Craig Bender may not like this post. But that is true, Sun is freaking slow as a company, especially when dealing with things that somehow touch the Microsoft layer/market.

I just hope they will not wait another three years to come up with an RDP6 compatible client…

Cheers!