For this instalment the product I am going cover is Microsoft Dynamics GP which is very interesting compared to MSCRM (part 6) and MOSS (part 7) in that it is not web based and thus a completely new challenge to expose in a web based hosting environment. For those who not know the architecture it is a Windows form application (not sure if it is .Net or WinAPI) but the GUI is a thin veil to a monster SQL database with so many tables and stored procs it is scary. So the normal way is that the user gets this client installed and the client directly connects to the SQL server. So if you thinking for hosting that you end up having to allow direct connections over the web to SQL, think again. The security risk of this just makes that a huge no. So after spending some time investigating the other people offering hosted GP, the solution everyone else seems if give you a server and let you remote in via Citrix. As this is a Microsoft end to end solution, Citrix is not an option, but Microsoft does have Terminal Services (TS) to compete and in Windows Server 2008 it can compete better than before. TS has always been this way to connect to a full session, which is nice, but we don't want nice, we want amazing. So the TS in Windows 2008 has a feature called Remote Applications.
Remote Apps lets an admin publish an application to a user, so it runs from a special icon, an MSI file (which you could deploy using AD or System Centre) or from a web site, and looks just like it is running on the users machine. In the background it is spawning a normal TS session on the server, starting the application and pushing the UI of the application only to the user. It's great as the user thinks it's on it's machine and it's super fast thanks to the lots of server power the application has and it is not fighting for resources on the client machine.
As this is the first version of this there is still some rough edges which need addressing. Firstly the application still runs on the server, so if you go File -> Open you browse the servers file system :( I know TS an share drives from the client to host, but the look like other drives not the normal C, D etc... users are expecting. What should be happening is that the admin should be able to disable the servers drives from being exposed and the clients drives are the only ones shown. The same should apply to printers. One advantage for GP is that working with the file system isn't a big requirement, but the printing is and that is less of a pain. The next area is security, it is still launching a TS session and that means if you want to allow a user to run a remote application, they end up needing login rights. I understand the technical requirements around this but there should be a way to separate people who will login via TS to the machine and those who just need Remote Apps on the terminal service level. Despite this Microsoft Dynamics GP looked like it was going to be difficult, but in the end was very easy to deploy.