Konect Launcher - a bit more detail

One of the most recurring frustrations or nuisances in working in thin client computing environments such as Citrix or Windows Terminal Services has always been the flipping back and forth between local and remote desktops. The larger company market is somewhat "educated" on local and remote desktops where these types of solutions have been used for years. But that isn't necessarily the case with small and mid-size businesses (SMBs).

What we have found very interesting in SMBs is that the introduction of a remote desktop actually increases computing complexity much more than what you might expect when creating 2 desktops for users - as we have done with our Konect product. The complexity comes in a number of different forms:

• Desktop confusion - in some SMB computing environments a local desktop can look almost identical to a remote desktop in terms of its colors, menus and desktop shortcuts. Users new to this 2 desktop environment can quickly become confused about which desktop they are actually using.
• Resource access and location confusion - introducing a second desktop creates confusion for new users about where they need to go to find the software and / or resources they need to do their job. We like to think of this as the introduction of some mental gymnastics. Now users need to think through where all of their programs and resources are located as a step in actually doing their work. It may seem insignificant but we know that this slowly creeps up as a productivity drain.
• Login complexity - Working on your own local desktop is simple when you access different software and resources. Unless you have added your own layer of security, generally you have seamless access to everything. Working on a remote desktop can be a completely different story for SMBs. We would like to think that all businesses adhere to the strict licensing restrictions put on them by their software vendors but we all know there is a different reality and that creates some of the additional complexity. Now there may be logins to use the solution that actually gets you the remote desktop, logins to shared resources, logins to different software applications, logins to shared software applications that only have one available user license, etc.

There is a simple solution to address this spiralling complexity ... its our Konect Launcher feature available in Konect v5.0 which was just launched recently (as noted below). We took a very elegant approach to integrating a remote desktop into a local desktop.

The Konect Launcher streamlines and simplifies the user experience by eliminating the remote desktop all together - and with it all of that additional complexity and confusion. Using user security profiles in Active Directory and resource access configurations in Konect, the Konect Launcher sits on the local desktop as a toolbar. This toolbar displays active links to all of the software and network resources that the user has been given access to on the server.

The Konect Launcher is so simple and yet so powerful for SMBs that don't have the depth of experience with remote / thin client computing and don't have the time for training.