Central Administration a Plus

Even if most files sit on servers, it is impossible to run some programs from a local machine unless you run a local installation program," says Greg Scott, IS manager for the College of Business at Oregon State University. When there is an application-related problem with such programs, tech support personnel often have to reinstall at the workstation. This can be quite an involved process. For instance, Word has eight to 10 file locations you must set because the defaults are not correct for College of Business users.

"It is a constant source of irritation for us that Microsoft requires so much of their software to be installed locally," says Scott. "This whole area is a really burning issue for me, irrespective of the Network PC hardware platform. I've never believed that technology should constrain what users can do. I don't think that p eople are untrustworthy and you have to lock things down because of that. Hardware limitations don't interest me, but central administration interests me greatly."

"Microsoft actually seems to have regressed in this area in recent years," Scott notes. For example, you used to be able to install Microsoft Office applications, such as Word, entirely on the server, he says. Now that is impossible, with the result that the College of Business spends tens of thousands of dollars a year in support costs to update drivers and the like on every PC. In addition, it is much more difficult to protect local d isks from viruses. At one point, the College of Business was seeing 500 to 600 new infections a day, mostly variants of the Word macro virus, the concept virus.

Local installation also eats up disk space, a serious problem for Scott, who has to support a number of older 486 machines with 200-MB hard disks. In labs, local installation allows students to change the configuration of a program, so the next user finds an unfamiliar environment. This became a serious problem for Scott with the Access database in Office 95. "We struggled with Access and finally became convinced that we had to go to a local installation," he recalls. "It was the biggest disaster I have ever seen. Students changed settings, and it was absolute chaos."

"We have some really bright individuals here, and we all struggled mightily to get Microsoft's FrontPage Web-authoring application to work from a network installation," says Scott. "The consensus we reached is that you can't do it. I have 25 copies of FrontPage on a shelf, an d I am going to throw it away. I am not going to support local installations of this product."

Along with support snafus, roving users have problems when configuration information resides on the local machine. In practice, people may have to work from their own machines to access the proper devices, default directories, and files. Windows 95 and Windows NT Workstation 4.0 introduced user profiles that allowed roving users to have a consistent system environment, such as which applications appear on the Windows desktop and which devices are available. However, these versions of Windows did not address application configuration issues.

"The vast majority of our users are rovers," says Scott. "They spend a little while working in the office, a while in an electronic classroom, in a student lab, in a faculty lab. They might be on four different machines in the course of a day. We want them to be able to see the same desktop and tool settings, including access to files. Every time a user logs in on a n ew machine, Windows wants to create a local profile. We support 2500 business students plus another two- to three-thousand nonbusiness students. Under this scenario, I'm looking at a couple of thousand profiles per machine at a minimum. Instead, we have lab assistants that clean the profiles off local hard drives once a week. This is progress?"