Why does MEDEP use Citrix?

GIS software is typically very computer-intensive, and requires large amounts of data.  In the past, MEDEP has tried installing GIS software on users' computers and having copies of the data on each machine.  That results in several management problems, including:

   - High level of maintenance to keep each machine up to date in terms of versions, patches, etc.
   - Difficulty in providing consistent data - every data update had to be replicated to each PC
   - If data were centralized on a server, data travelling to regional offices would be too slow to use

Citrix software allows MEDEP to install the GIS software on a single server in Augusta, and 'publish' that application out to end-users.  Thus, very few people using ArcGIS at MEDEP actually have ArcGIS installed on their computer.  This diagram shows how it works:



In our Citrix setup, no user can actually 'see' the Citrix server's hard drives to store data or maps.  This is all done in the shared folder \\depsuna\workspace, as shown in Exercise 1, and in the diagram below:


There are many benefits to doing GIS this way, including:
   - Projects can be shared
   - Data are not duplicated
   - Performance is independent of user’s computer
   - Tape backup every weeknight
   - High-speed data transfer

Of course there is one major drawback - since everything is in one place, if the server or network goes down, nobody can do GIS.