Thin Client Portable Training System

Today we rebuilt our portable training system for a new series of courses on Office 2007 with Microsoft Exchange. With this kit of six bags, including a projector, we can set up a training room for six people in a matter of minutes. This is possible because current PCs are very powerful, in fact one PC has sufficient computing power to run a whole office.

We achieve this by using "Thin Client Technology" where all the work is carried out on one laptop (PC) and students use low specification laptops as simple terminals. Each terminal is basically a screen, keyboard and mouse communicating over a wireless network to the main PC. The courses can be set up and prepared in advance and the tutor has the ability to monitor and control each student session from his master PC.

This is only one example of Thin Client. We have a number of customers who use this technology successfully every day, often with staff completely unaware of the technology being used. There are many advantages to this approach, particularly as we have found the support costs are about one third of similar offices with standard PCs. Anyone can log on to any screen and keyboard in the office, they always see their own desktop and are able to pick up where they left off. In addition offices in different towns can be connected via the Internet, so people in the remote office can use the same information and resources very easily and conveniently. We have found this technology is very successful for the vast majority of office users who tend to use the mainstream office applications. We now believe that Thin Client should be considered as a first option for most office environments.