Run your office while sat at home with your 486
Original article date: March 2001
I discovered a fascinating product the other day, which could be useful for a lot of engineering companies looking to keep control while expanding. It’s called Citrix Metaframe.
It works like this. Instead of every member of your company having a modern 800MHz PC running MS Office and all the other applications your company uses, you put one particularly beefy PC in a cupboard and run the ‘Citrix server’ software on it. Then you kit everybody out with an old 486 with a nice screen, and run the ‘Citrix client’ on each one. This is the only program these PCs will ever actually run. Then you link it all up with a network.
Now, instead of everyone running Windows and all their applications on their own PC, they each have a copy of Windows running on the server. Every key press and mouse click they do goes to the server through the network, and every change to what they see on the screen comes back over the network and is displayed. The amount of network traffic to achieve this sort of behaviour is surprisingly low. It’s all running like a mainframe, with the 486 acting as a dumb terminal, but it looks exactly as if you have Windows running on your PC.
The are a number of obvious advantages: it’s cheaper per user to beef up the server (or create a cluster of servers) than it is to keep buying new PCs for every desk every two or three years; deployment of applications will be a lot easier for the IT department, since although there needs to be an Office license for every office user, it is only actually installed on one PC; and adding new users to the system is easier too. Then you start to see other benefits. You can effectively have a ‘hot desk’. Whose PC you are sat at depends only on who you logged in as. You don’t waste money on unused capacity. And the actual amount of network traffic is less than in a normal company. Whereas before you might have moved big files over the network (or sent big emails) now the only thing moving over the network is the user interface, and files moved between users are in fact just moving within the server.
But then here’s the really sexy bit. The network connection could be a dial up internet connection. That means, sat at home with your 486, you can run any or all of your office applications via a modem. And when you go to collect and read your email, it runs at company email speed, not dial up email speed. The data itself, remember, hasn’t actually left the server. It doesn’t matter how CPU-intensive the application is, because it is all actually running on the server. In addition, the company’s IT department can call up anyone’s screen remotely and watch that user work. It can even create a second ‘guidance’ cursor on a user’s screen to demonstrate a new feature or technique without anyone having to drag themselves to that user’s office and demonstrate personally. This is called shadowing. It means the IT department can be on a different site, or even in a different country. Further, the user’s 486 could in fact be one of many platforms – PC, Mac, Unix, certain PDAs, digital television, even a certain games console, have all been proposed as platforms for the client software, all displaying perfectly normal looking Windows.
Of course, it costs money. But for a few hundred quid per user, it’s easy to see how it will pay for itself, and if your company were ever about to go through a big phase of new PC upgrading, it would certainly be worth looking into. Packages start from as little as five users.
It’s been around for a couple of years now, and in the US it claims to be in use in 50% of Fortune 500 companies. So it must work…
March 2001