Review: ThinkGrid Hosted Desktop

ThinkGrid's Hosted Desktop service offers companies a way to get the benefits of a Windows PC for each employee, without needing to manage the systems themselves. The service provides virtual Windows clients hosted in a datacentre, with remote access via an internet connection.

Available now, the ThinkGrid Hosted Desktop is aimed mostly at smaller businesses without an IT department, and is intended to let such customers outsource much of the effort involved in maintaining a network of Windows PCs and associated applications, including email and office apps.

The service also has the advantage that ThinkGrid can turn on access to other applications, such as Acrobat Professional, if desired. Customers can pay to access extra applications on a per-month basis, and then turn them off again if they are no longer required.

On the downside, having desktops provided from a datacentre makes a company more dependent on its network connection. A loss of service would mean no access to applications and data, so customers may need to choose a communications provider offering some concrete form of service level agreement.

However, the fact that your desktop can be accessed from almost anywhere means that employees should be able to continue to work from home, or some other site with internet access, if required.

Customers will still need to provide users with some type of client device in order to access their online desktop. This can be an existing Windows PC or a thin client terminal, which ThinkGrid can supply if required.

We tested a trial Hosted Desktop account and found it gave quite a satisfactory user experience. Once past the log-in, it was easy to believe that the Windows desktop was running on the system we were seated at, rather than being delivered from a remote datacentre.

The Hosted Desktop automatically links up to the printer drivers on your local system, so that if you hit print in Word, the pages come out of your local printer. The Hosted Desktop also maps to any drives on the local system, so you can upload or download files, and it plays sounds from the virtual PC through the local system.

The only disappointment we found was that some multimedia content did not play as well as we might expect on a normal PC. For example, while the videos found on our own web site played reasonably well, the sound was often not in synchronisation.

Despite this, we found the ThinkGrid Hosted Desktop closer to the experience of using a real PC than you would typically expect from accessing a Citrix or Terminal Services session via a thin client. For example, users can customise their desktop with their own wallpaper and even install applications onto their virtual machine. During tests, we downloaded and installed Google Talk, for example.

We accessed our trial account from several different systems and found the desktop responsive whether we were using the office internet connection, a domestic broadband service, or from a laptop using Wi-Fi. ThinkGrid recommends a minimum 96Kbit/s of bandwidth per user, so even a 1Mbit/s broadband connection should be able to service 10 employees.

Users access their Hosted Desktop through a customer log-in on ThinkGrid's web site. They are then presented with a page of icons that links to their hosted desktop, as well as all the Windows applications available to them.

The site also provides a web-based Configuration & Administration control panel that allows them to view statistics and manage their services, including adding extra resources such as new applications.

Clicking an application icon, such as Word, launches the program on your ThinkGrid Hosted Desktop, but the application's Window appears on the computer in front of you as if it was running locally. This is an alternative to opening a full-screen remote desktop session when you just need to access your Outlook inbox, for example.

Whether you choose a single application or a full desktop session, users must have a small (less than 5MB) software client installed on the system they are using as their access console. If this is not detected when you log in, you will be prompted to download it.

The client itself is part of the Virtual Access Suite (VAS) from Quest Software, and is based on Microsoft's commonly used Remote Desktop Protocol, with extensions to better support multimedia and remote printing.

A client download is currently available only for Windows XP or Windows Vista, although a Java client is said to be in the pipeline that will allow a wider range of computers, such as Mac OS X and Linux systems, to act as the local console for a ThinkGrid Hosted Desktop.

We tested using PCs running Vista and XP as the access device, and also with a thin client running Windows XP Embedded. For the latter, we had to use administrator privileges to turn off the write filter blocking changes to the file system, so we could install the VAS client. However, customers should be able to purchase thin clients ready provisioned with the client, if this is how they wish to access their ThinkGrid desktop account.

The advantage of a thin client is that these devices typically consume less energy than a PC, and are less susceptible to malware as users cannot install applications.

ThinkGrid pricing starts at £49 per user per month, or £490 for an annual contract. For this, each user gets their own virtual PC with 5GB disk space and Microsoft Office 2007 Standard, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

For additional fees, customers can add shared folders that are available to selected users, a hosted Exchange email server, and a hosted SharePoint server.