We are getting ready to transition from E9 to E10(scheduled to transition at the first of the year).
Today we got access to the E10 web client for the first time and are still sorting out some issues with getting the fat client installed(we don’t have active directory and our consultant thinks we need it - any feedback on this?). We’re interested to start getting users into E10 from a training and data validation standpoint. What are the pros / cons of the web client(performance is not very impressive so far) vs the fat client, and are there any recommendations if starting data validation and training via the web client is premature at this point?
There’s a third option of running the fat client on the App server via terminal services.
Our IT wanted this, as they’d only have to maintain one client machine. A plus is that people could access the system from the road. One negative, printing on the users workstation can be slow to populate the printer list
I’ll add a fourth. Both web and rich client as needed. Just look at outlook and outlook.com. Both do roughly the same thing but user acceptance varies on need. Kick the tires on both.
For active directory I assume they want you to use that to push out updates to clients. There are alternatives but active directory group policy is a good way.
RDP or Paralles is an awful option IMO. Sure easier from an IT staff standpoint but for the end user
Export to excel is a hassle
File operations are extremely cumbersome for the avg user
Printing is hellish
Shared Cache issues and. Corruption (unless setup correctly)
Copy paste is iffy at best…
Etc
I’d say fat client and web access are the way to go. Or Fat client over https… a little of both ( that’s not true) lol
BTW you don’t need active directory (though frankly I’d get there asap if I were you) you can deploy via FTP instead of shared network resource and do https binding
This was a necessity when we were on V8, and the company was bought by another, and the parent company insisted on having the App server in their remote data center. V8 did NOT like the latency and connection issues between the clients in PA, and the data center in Georgia.
Whenever someone has issues, I recommend installing the client on their local machine. - regardless of the issue or its root cause. Probably have about 25% the users running from a local client.
Thank @josecgomez this was actually the suggestion our IT team wants to use for validating E10 and training users(create a virtual machine and let people RDP in). The reason IT is suggesting this is to avoid any issues with having both E9 and E10 installed on the same machine. Your feedback is extremely helpful as I hadn’t considered these issues. Are there any issues with qualifying E10 while still using E9 to run the business on the same PC?
There are minimum levels of the .Net run-time but you can have multiple clients on the same box. In fact, we run different versions of Live, Pilot, (and Education) as we move through acceptance testing for new releases.