Today’s Thin PC experience has been to set up a computer at work to see what I can do with it. I wrote a custom shell in Delphi 5 which has a very simple task of launching Remote Desktop Connection and passing a RDP file to it. This means the user doesn’t have to do anything. By enabling the RD SSO settings in Group Policy, they don’t have to specify their username and password to log on to the RD server, instead the username and password they used to log onto Windows are used. The thin PC is joined to the domain so all the settings are configured using Group Policy. So when the user logs on to the computer, they don’t get the standard Windows shell; instead, they get connected automatically to the RD Server. When they quit Remote Desktop Connection by logging off, the only option they have, the custom shell detects the quit and automatically logs them off the computer as well.
There is a bit of tweaking still to do but overall this is a very positive and worthwhile experience getting this working.