> That's sounds really good. Many Thanks for your fast answer
> and your Hint about the Terminal-Server. Can you tell me
> what product you use ?

Getting off-topic, so I'll try to be brief. If you want more details
contact me privately...

My biggest client uses plain Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server
Edition. Actually they now have 3 servers running, about 20 users on
each server - some running MS-Office, all running my app as MS-Outlook
Express etc. I think they are managing about 6-8 users over each 48k
frame-relay link (which can burst to 64k). The three terminal servers
are on a 100Mbps backbone to the database server.

About half the users are simply accessing the terminal servers over
the LAN. We dont need to, but this allows all the setup and admin to
be done on the three servers and we never have to touch the
PCs/Terminals. I can dial-in and access the terminal servers to
perform maintenance etc, users can dial-in from home and get their
"work" desktop.

It is theoretically possible to dial-in from a mobile phone (9600bps)
and use the terminal server session. In practise the screen refresh
on visually complicated apps like office are a bit slow for this to be
truly practical.

(NOTE: color resolution is restricted to 16/256 color modes. This
does mean that there are some restrictions on what looks on a terminal
server session.)

About half the users (some LAN some WAN) connect using special
terminals (NCD ThinStars in this case) running Windows CE, designed
for use purely to connect to terminal server. If they break you
replace them. No fiddling, no arguing and no time wasting. Since
they dont have any moving parts (no harddrive, no fans) they rarely
break.

If you want extended management and connectivity options you can look
at adding Citrix MetaFrame and/or NCD WinCenter to the terminal
servers.


Soon it should be possible to build our applications using Kylix.
This should make it possible to save money and use XWindows on Linux
servers instead of using MS-Terminal Server (essentially the same
thing but the XWindows technology has been around a lot longer). I
believe the NCD ThinStar terminals can be setup to connect to XWindows
servers (presumably other brands would have similar capabilities).


Thats probably enough to give you the idea. The main reason I keep
mentioning it on this list is that it really does make a difference to
application development. You can concentrate on meeting
user-interface requirements and stop worrying so much about network
performance issues.


Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing