Ashley Vance wrote an interesting article in the NY Time Technology section yesterday: Revived Fervor for Smart Monitors Linked to a Server. She talks about thin clients, servers and all the wonderful things about it. I love thin clients and I was disappointed a number of years ago when the thin client and terminal server model failed to spread.
It just makes sense in a small, medium or large business to implement thin clients at some level. In 2005 when I was a small business consultant, a few of our clients were real estate agencies which many of the employees were not full time or simply contractors/consultants/etc and they had their own laptop. For company data, they would log on to a terminal server session and be granted whatever access they had. Their laptop, in effect, was a thin client. We enjoyed setting up numerous thin clients all over the office, along with monitors and keyboards, for access when you didn't have your laptop.
Now with virtual machines, we can replace terminal servers and have much better security and scalability. And no more having to reboot the entire server when a few terminal sessions were having problems!
One of my favorite features about thin clients is security. Everything the user does is on the server. As a small business consultant, I would face challenges with users feeling they had the right to download whatever they wanted on their company's computer and usually resulted in spyware, viruses and malware. Users thought that the "R drive" was safe and the "C drive" was for personal use. Just because you have a folder called "C:\personal" doesn't mean it can't hold a virus or more embarrassingly, photos from your Mexican vacation that show up in search results. With thin clients, it's pretty obvious you're on the company's computer and you should be doing work.
For companies that want to give their employees some personal space on their computers, I recommend a hybrid version: fat client (regular computer) for personal stuff that isn't maintained by an IT services company. Log into your own virtual machine on the server for business related work. In some years, the boss does not have to upgrade the computers since all business related work is done on the servers. If the boss is nice, she or he will upgrade your computer, though it isn't necessary. This will save the company a lot of money too; not only in hardware upgrades, but with the associated costs of maintaining hardware.
