Thanks to all those who responded.
Thin clients are cheaper because the cost is about 2/3 of a desktop
computer. However, they are not easy to manage so your technology
department has to be well trained and able to problem shoot. We are in the
second year of having 49 thin clients in our library. The first 6 months
were a nightmare as the system failed in five or six different ways. I
spent 15 minutes every period just to get the kids logged on. And if one of
the bank of servers went down the system slowed to a crawl.
I'm a very patient person but after six months of numerous problems I lost
my temper with the technology department. The tech director made fixing my
thin client problems a very high priority and they eliminated 5 of the 6
problems we were experiencing by the end of the year.
Over the summer they moved the accounts to a cloud platform rather then
tying the workstations to a specific account. When we had a minor problem
of accounts not logging off it made it difficult for the tech to determine
which account in the cloud was acting up. Everything was going fairly
smoothly until this week when the some cloud accounts started acting up with
the domain controller. It took four days for the tech team to isolate the
problem.
If I was the tech director I would pull the plug if the system isn't running
smoothly by the end of the year. Unfortunately, this is the "newest"
technology bandwagon people are jumping on to save money so don't be
surprised if your district goes in this direction. However, the last time
someone asked this question on LM_Net the only replies were all negative and
several districts had dropped this technology because they couldn't get it
to work.
Gail
--
Gail Shea Grainger
Librarian, Chesterfield School, Chesterfield, NH
Dewey Browse --K-12 Web site cataloged by Dewey Decimal Classification
http://www.deweybrowse.org ggrainger@deweybrowse.org
Past President NHSLMA
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