StairJunkie

For those of you who have multiple sales people in your company who rely on cad/cam/visualization/design or any expensive software really... does each sales person have a copy on their computer or do they make a rough sketch and let one person do all the designs?

Why do I ask, well a lot of software limits license use to only 1 computer so if you use $1-3k software apps... it can add up fast. Would like to know what the rest of you are doing.

Much appreciated!

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msteinhoff

When I was working for a large company, we hosted all 'exotic' software on a Citrix server. AutoCAD 2006 was one such program.

Software that was used all day, every day was installed locally but high dollar software that was not primarily used concurrently got hosted.

The initial cost of Citrix environment was higher than we liked but, once installed, it saved us time and money. Best of all, it allowed our top CAD guy to take a vacation every once and a while and still be able to make changes remotely over the internet. (While there were several people who had been through AutoCAD training, there is a big difference between being able to make minor design changes and actually knowing AutoCAD.)

If you can't justify the cost of a Citrix or MS Terminal Server environment, you may be able to install your specialized appliation on the PC of the person who uses it the most and then just use remote desktop (built into Windows) for those who rarely use the application.

Cheers,
Matt

StairJunkie

What kind of dollar figure are we talking about for Citrix? And this cannot be accomplished with either windows server or ubuntu (linux) server? thanks for the tip!

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msteinhoff

I couldn't even begin to tell you. If you already have the hardware and Microsoft server, it could probably be done for a couple thousand dollars. Maybe less. If you don't have a viable computer with a Microsoft license, it could be a whole lot more.

Call a local IT consultant. If they quote you a price (or even a ballpark) without knowing what you already have installed and available to use, call another local IT consultant.

The more people you have in your office and the more people who need to use exotic applications, the more cost effective solution Citrix becomes.

If you already have a computer/server running Windows XP or better, you can use the built-in Remote Desktop functionality to host AutoCAD or just about any other application. Just install the application on that computer/server and then let whoever needs to use the application remotely connect. Only one person at a time can use AutoCAD but for most operations, that isn't a problem.

Over an office LAN, even a video-intensive program like AutoCAD has good performance. While useable over the internet, screen redraws may be a little slow depending on your internet connection speed and latency.

Still, since the funcationality is built into Windows, it's free to give it a shot. If it works, great. If the performance sucks, at least it didn't cost you anything other than a couple hours time to test.

While it is possible to run some versions of AutoCAD in a GNU/Linux environment, I wouldn't. Linux is the wrong tool for the job and I say that as someone who has been using Linux for 15 years. (I suddenly feel very old.)

One more tip that probably boarders on advertising or solicitation but since I don't make any money on the transaction, I'm going to throw it out there anyway... My brother's IT Consulting firm, DedicatedIT, is giving away $25,000 worth of consulting, Microsoft and Citrix products. The only string attached is if you win the Xtreme Network Makeover contest, they get to write an article about your network and business and use it in their marketing materials.

Businesses in South Florida are preferred but a really compelling story from another part of the country could win (even though the rules say otherwise).

(Moderators, feel free to take a ruler to my knuckles Catholic school nun style if the above violates any anti-promotion rules.)

Cheers,
Matt