Kevin Woodward, Pro Staff's network systems engineer/administrator, and
Kevin Smith, the company's IS director, both played key roles in the WinFrame
and Winterm project. Here's what they had to say.
Q: What did you like about the project's implementation?
KS: The concept of basing an entire enterprise system on WinFrame's
application server, using terminals instead of traditional desktop computers as
workstations was unusualno one had implemented this approach on such a
large scale. Seeing the successful implementation was exciting. We achieved the
many advantages we hoped for: ease of management, simplicity, scaleability, and
cost savings.
Q: What didn't you like about the project's implementation?
KW: Some of the same things that made this an exciting project also made it
challenging. Because most of this technology is so new, nobody is an expert on
its implementation, especially with additional components: You're pretty much on
your own. Applications reacted in unexpected ways when we installed them in
WinFrame's multiuser environment and handled the cluster failovers differently.
Most of the really vexing problems involved fooling applications into believing
they were serving one user instead of 40 potential users on each WinFrame box.
Q: What would you have done differently on the project?
KW: The gotchas were related to Microsoft's workstation-centric approach to
personal computing. In WinFrame's multiuser environment, to make Word and Excel
refer to a new user's home directory, an administrator must log in as that user
and set the default file locations in each application. This procedure adds an
entry to the Registry that points the document path to the correct location.
Like Office, Microsoft Exchange doesn't use the login to validate a user, but
instead uses a Registry entry created during client installation. To log in to
Exchange as a different user, you have to delete the displayed username, enter
the new username, click Check Names, click OK, and enter the application. If you
don't follow these steps, you lock up the application. Our solution was to
install Exchange so that the username reads, "Enter your name here."
This way, users can simply type in their name and log in. Another solution is to
install the client for each user, creating a unique Registry entry on the server
and letting users see their name in the Exchange login dialog. Unfortunately,
the client requires about 8MB of disk. We're working with our VAR, Citrix, and
Microsoft to find a better solution.
Q: What advice can you give your peers?
KS: The cost savings from using Winterm terminals instead of PCs,
centralized software distribution and management, and the scaleability of the
platform will more than offset the initial configuration obstacles. As software
developers focus more attention on the WinFrame platform, they will tailor more
applications to work seamlessly with Citrix's ICA protocol. In fact, I
understand Microsoft will begin to include ICA with future versions of Win95,
Internet Explorer 3.0, and NT.