At the 2013 GPUG Summit, Mariano convinced me that I could setup the web client to play with and Kevin Racer showed me how to make it happen. So I went home and played with it on Friday night and work out the Azure idiosyncrasies on Saturday morning. Before Kevin was back in Fargo, I had the web client up on Windows Azure.
Once I got it up it was a weird anti-climactic experience. Once the login screen came up, everything just worked. In other words, either nothing comes up and you’re probably still working through security/certificate issues or it works. There isn’t much middle ground.
So now I’m really playing with the web and I have to say, it’s good. It’s really good. It’s familiar enough that most users will be fine. There are some differences, so if you’re still hooked on the old style menus at the top, get over yourself. They are gone. I’ll cover more UI items separately once I feel like I have a pretty good list.
I do have a couple of deployment thoughts.
A single server deployment with 8 gigs of ram is expected to allow about 60 connections, roughly double that of Terminal Server. An awful lot of companies using GP will be just fine with less than 60 users so I won’t be surprised to see a lot of single server deployments. This may also help adoption because single server deployments are pretty straightforward
Once you chose a scale out deployment with more than one server, it seems to make sense to leave enough capacity to take a server down. For example, if I have 100 users, that sounds like 2 servers, 50 users per server. But if I add a 3rd server, I’m down to 33 users per server and I have the capacity to take a server off line for maintenance and still let all of my users login.
Also, the deployments scale pretty well with additional RAM so that could be a scale out option if necessary as well.
Finally, buy a real, wildcard (*) certificate from GoDaddy, VeriSign, etc. You can test with a self signed one, but it’s not worth the effort installing certs in production. GoDaddy is like $100-$200 /year, VeriSign is more like $600, but even at that level, you’ll spend that in time just trying to get user certificates installed. I’m thinking we should just roll the cost of a cert into the consulting charge for the deployment.
The documentation for installation is really good. End user usage and UI documentation still needs some work, but maybe I just haven’t found the right document yet.
Bottom line, the web client is in extremely good shape and we need some folks using it to tease out the improvement.