I can’t speak to the specific issues your wife is encountering with Citrix, but I can speak to the way the remote desktop technology works and why a great deal of firms rely on Remote Web Workplace (actually called Remote Web Access in the latest version of SBS) or Terminal Server (or Citrix). For the purposes of our discussion, let’s collectively call this “remote desktop” since that’s how both RWW and TS/Citrix work.

You are correct in that a Client VPN can allow you to work on your local computer and have access to the files on your company network. While I agree with the inference that the best experience is generally experienced by running applications natively on your PC, Remote Web Workplace and Terminal Server (particularly Server 2008 R2), should provide an extremely good experience if properly configured. If setup and maintained properly, it can be almost indistinguishable with working off of a local PC.

Regarding network connectivity, both bandwidth and latency conspire to make client VPN performance less than ideal. Most applications work very well with a LAN, but a when you have a WAN, it can get very problematic. That’s where the remote desktop approach works so well. It’s specifically designed to work very well over a WAN. Remote desktop requires extremely low bandwidth and is very forgiving with respect to latency.

Latency is often the bigger killer for remote access over a VPN. Chatty applications that continuously talk with the server, wait for a response, send another request, etc. do not work in an acceptable fashion in a VPN configuration. There are many applications that simply do not perform acceptably with any sort of latency. Amicus Attorney is one application that comes immediately to mind, but there are many others. The only way to get reasonable performance with these applications is through a remote desktop approach. Running a chatty application on a remote desktop works great since all of the chattiness happens locally on a LAN and the screen efficiently appears on your remote desktop.

For what I’m taking as your specific example, I’m reading into what you’ve posted that your wife is trying to edit Word documents and is required to do this through Citrix/TS. You could alternatively access documents over a VPN, but this is problematic. You may find that you work OK this way, but I’ve also seen where people get frustrated with this and then setup Windows offline folders to automatically synch copies of files. This can work OK, but is more complex and can frequently end up with synchronization problems, particularly if someone else goes to edit the same document (there are other situations as well that can cause problems). In this configuration, sometimes people decide to just copy documents locally and then copy it back. Once again, they may clobber updates someone else did on that same document while they worked on their copy, they may forget, or not bother to copy the files back to the server and now you have the original and only copies of important company data shared on a home PC.

I’m not sure what problem your wife is encountering, but I do understand that few things are as frustrating as technology not working the way that you need it to work. A remote desktop solution really should be the best approach and the issues should be fixable. If you could describe the problem that she’s encountering a little better, it would be helpful. It would also be helpful to understand what version of Office and version of Terminal Server & Citrix (if you have that info).

Thanks,

Dave

I used to live in a country where it was normal for households to have 10mbit upstream as well as downstream and sure, the TS solutions worked ok. Nonetheless you cannot get away from the fact that all the processing gets done on the server and is submitted to the client.
When using a Client VPN you are doing all the work on your local computer and just have access to the files on your company network.

Sure it requires that you have a computer that has applications installed, most of the work remoters do could be covered with a few basic applications. If you lack an application, ok then connect to a TS server or similar.

That approach has worked for me for many years now and I see how my wife is struggling using her Citrix to try to review and edit documents.

Best regards,

Martin