Chris and Daves SharePoint and Tech Blog

In Dave’s previous post he talked about the back-end for our delivery of remote programs. I’m going to explain how we then surfaced this through SharePoint.

For those of you that have set up remote programs you will probably be aware of the web part for it, we found that using this didn’t give us very much flexibility in which programs are surfaced. So we came up with a couple of other methods.

The first is by far the simplest; the good old content editor web part! Just put your .rdp files in an accessable location along with some icons. Add the content editor part to the page and add the images, hyperlinked to the rdp file. Simple.

The way we now deliver remote programs is to store the rdp file, the icon and any description or meta data in a sharepoint list. We give them categories to enable us to group them and just render the list with xslt. Again very simple but very effective.

Of course all this transfers to SharePoint 2010 without issue.

Mike Herrity recently did a post on delivering programs to all of our users through SharePoint 2007 so I thought I would do a quick follow up post with a bit more technical detail on how we achieved this.

  We have been using terminal services for about 9 years giving students and staff the ability to logon to our servers remotely and still get the same desktop experience as though they had logged on to a workstation at Twynham. So with the release of Server 2008 for me one of the best new features was remote programmes now I know that Citrix had been delivering remote apps for many years but this was beyond our pocket. After creating an RDP file it soon became very obvious that this was very easily delivered through our SharePoint Gateways.

 Below you can see the final RDP file when opened with notepad, this was very much an OOTB solution just requiring a document library to store the RDP files and a page setup up for users to find the programmes that we offered.

The situation we suffered before was that students who did not have access to Microsoft Office used to bring work in in varies formats that office could not open which meant the coursework deadlines where missed simply because they did not have Office installed at home. This situation no longer exists as if students do not have office they now know to logon to the gateway and use remote programmes. The spin off was that we can now offer faculty specific software a good example is the technology department who use 2D Design and Pro desktop two technical drawing packages that no students would have installed on their PC’s at home enabling staff to set homework tasks using this software.

 Delivering programmes through our SharePoint gateway will also enable us to deploy Office 2010 when it becomes available just by uninstalling Office 2007 and installing Office 2010 giving students access to the latest version of as soon as this appears on our licence site.