Our computer services have been outsourced for about 1 1/2 years (not IS's decision, either). Our office is in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and our equipment / service provider is located in South Carolina. We have been using pcAnywhere and Citrix to connect our developers to our fat clients at our service provider. We have also tried Microsoft's RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol in W2K Terminal Services).
Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Microsoft's RDP was noticably faster in interaction/editing, but actual check-ins and check-outs were slower.
I am using pcAnywhere, and find my response time from awful to very slow, depending on network traffic (and no, you don't ever get used to it...)
Other developers use Citrix because their pcAnywhere (same software / PC setup as mine) runs only about 1/2 to 1/4 the speed I see.
We aren't using Microsoft RDP, because there was some extra cost to get it set up, and it wasn't approved (or proposed - we don't know which), but of the three methods it seemed the fastest in the limited testing we did on it.
We did have a consultant talk to us about installing Demo Jr on the local workstations, and using them for development based off of MS-Access. This would be very fast, but causes problems with the check-in, check-out process (have to do it both on the real DV server, and local workstation) - in a particular order; and even then the developers can step on each other by having the same object checked out at the same time. (Its been a while, so the description may be kind-of fuzzy...)
Hope that helps.
For anyone else out there with admin thinking about doing this - do your best to dissuade them from it. At OmniSource and everywhere else I've ever worked where it has been tried, the results are significantly less than desirable.
Among the additional problems we've experienced are:
* Miscommunication between Omni & Source Provider causing delays in critial projects (they thought they were waiting on us, when we'd both agreed the next step was theirs).
* Inability of service provider to execute a process correctly the first time - even with SOP's - this has improved over time, but we still experience a SP's "oops" about once a month -- at least they've finally broken their 100% first time failure record.
* Inability to control / manage our systems - even if we know what is wrong, we have to rely on them to fix it - at their convenience.
* Slow turn-around - for example, it takes them 6+ hours to build & deploy a simple 2-project, 10-object update package. Our CNC guy could do it in 2 hours (and that was taking his time).
* Sales Presentation vs. Reality - sales presentation was that they'd handled all sorts of JDE installations, including ones like ours on an AS/400 using IBM's DB. Fact - ours is their first and (so far) only AS/400 OneWorld/XE installation.
Outsourcing machine hosting may seem like a good idea from admin's point of view, but it provides poor results on a day-to-day basis.
End of Soapbox...
