Citrix Metaframe for Not Yet Techies

Citrix Metaframe is a Windows networking software Terminal Services add-on product that enables server based computing (also known as thin client computer). Citrix Metaframe is produced by Citrix Systems.

Citrix Metaframe began life when Ed Iacobucci founded the company in 1989. He had headed the IBM/Microsoft OS/2 development team and suggested they make OS/2 for multi-users. Neither IBM nor Microsoft liked the idea, so he quit to start his own company.

Eventually Microsoft did start adding Terminal Services as an option to its networking operating systems, though Windows 2000 was the first to ship with Terminal Services included. Citrix Metaframe has been an add-on product to Terminal Services ever since NT 3.51.

When I first started working a real job, before Citrix Metaframe and before Microsoft was a household name, all access to computers was done by a terminal connected to a huge mainframe computer. That's how every organization did it. A few years later personal computers came along and we started calling our terminals "dumb" terminals because, unlike PCs which could do a lot on their own, terminals could do nothing if not hooked up to the mainframe.

Although office workers are used to PCs, there're a lot of situations not to use PCs but terminals instead. Dirty areas such as manufacturing and warehouses. Areas with poor security (since terminals can do nothing on their own they're not attractive to thieves, though that didn't stop the burglar who broke into my office from stealing one, back before we switched to a LAN system. He also stole a telephone that would work only when hooked up to a proprietary network -- so he cut himself on the broken window glass for nothing.) Citrix Metaframe.

There are probably a lot of business areas where workers either do not or need not know how to use the full capabilities of a PC, just how to read and enter key data relating to their particular situations. Maybe an assembly line supervisor filling in a production report form. Buying terminals is much cheaper than PCs. Citrix Metaframe.

Citrix Metaframe is popular with Application Server Providers (ASPs). These are businesses that provide software applications, of course for a fee. Most consumer ASPs have failed but there is a place for specialized business ASPs.

Citrix Metaframe can publish applications instead of running them from a desktop, making upgrading software applications easier and quicker, better print drive and printer management capabilities, publishing applications to web pages with NFuse, advanced session shadowing, client time zones (remember, your teammate may be on a different continent), load balancing, centralized management console, support for non-Windows PC connections, read access to Active Directory and systems monitoring.

Citrix Metaframe uses its own Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) protocols.

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