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Background: I have a director who for reasons unknown will be working 'from home' at least two days a week for the forseeable future. He is equipped with a 3G data stick which in the past has been fine for the access he occasionally required.

Going forward though he will need access to documents and spreadsheets on shared resources some of which are huge, and downloading or working with them over the data stick using VPN isn't really feasible. I've looked at DSL in the past, but the reason he has the data stick is that his home DSL is with a cable provider, and we've really struggled to get VPN working properly with it.

I'm now looking at Terminal Services as a potential solution but I've not ever really done anything with it in the past so I need some resources to get me started.

Any help much appreciated, or alternatively if anyone has any better ideas I'd be happy to listen.

Marko Carter
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3 Answers3

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I've got a book called "Windows Server 2003/2000 Terminal Server Solutions", which is reasonably good. However I bought it after we'd done a lot of work with TS, purely as a reference and because it was very cheap. But it does seem to cover a lot of the stuff we went through. ISBN is 1-578-70276-3, published by Addison-Wesley and written by Todd W Mathers.

Mike Edwards
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Best advice I can give is to get your VPN sorted out. Surely you're not thinking of running a naked TS session over the Internet? As for starting with Terminal Services, why not begin by having a read of some of the many articles on the subject on the Microsoft site? They seem to know something about it. ;)

John Gardeniers
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  • No, I'm not! The issue is with the volume of data that has to be transferred when editing large documents. With TS the volume is decreased because all the data is manipulated on a host and only the 'screen' is being sent. The 3G device would handle this fine through the VPN. – Marko Carter Aug 11 '09 at 11:28
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If you're already going down the VPN route, why bother with a Terminal Server at all? Seems overkill for just one user. You can enable Remote Desktop on his client PC and give him access to that over a secure tunnel. The big advantage here is that he'll have the same desktop he uses in work, complete with any apps he needs (as well as any documents he may have saved to his desktop, which - knowing directors - there are probably quite a few of).

Maximus Minimus
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  • He only has a laptop - uses it on a dock in the office. The issue is with documents on network shares, every time you need to open one it transfers the whole document down to you, and back up every time you need to save. – Marko Carter Aug 11 '09 at 13:58