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With the advent of thin clients, the world of computing has come full circle. In the beginning, there were big mainframe computers and dumb terminals. Then there was the personal computer revolution, and the power was pushed to the desktop. Now we have gone back to the future with thin clients connected to centralized servers.
We tested a thin-client/server solution from Microsoft Corp. and Citrix Systems Inc., and we found it to be a good solution for federal agencies looking to deploy new applications while retaining centralized administration and control.
The combination of these two server software packages is ideal for organizations with heterogeneous networks featuring different types of clients and running multiple protocols.
The solution we tested included Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition (TSE), which extends the standard Windows NT platform to create a multiuser environment where all applications are executed on the server and client machines simply act as input/output devices. We also ran Citrix's MetaFrame server software, which adds several features to TSE.
First, TSE only supports Windows clients, but MetaFrame adds support for DOS, Java, OS/2, Unixbased clients and Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh. Second, TSE uses the Remote Display Protocol (RDP), which requires a high-bandwidth network and handles all communications with client machines. MetaFrame uses Citrix's proprietary Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) protocol, which works well over a wide range of network speeds all the way...