| Ok, one more thing and then we are ready to go live but before that, we need to make sure that you have trained everybody that will have access to the MetaFrame Access Management consoles and or share in responsibilities of end-user administration. You will also want to document any common administration tasks in the form of an Administrators Guide and present it to the administrators during training. As with the end-user, you will want to gather the Administrators together and give them a once over on all the tools they will use in their day-to-day administration. Tell them about the common issues they might experience and give them a 30,000-foot overview of the MetaFrame Access Solution and how it works. The goal is to educate them while allowing them to becoming familiar with the new product they will be supporting and at the same time getting them excited about the technology. Below I have documented a few of my administrators best practices Do not install third party print drivers. Third party printer drivers are not always tested in a Terminal Services environment. In order to guarantee stability, you must never install any un-trusted print drivers. You will want to contact the drive vendor and verify it has been tested in a Terminal Services environment and you will want to test it yourself on a test server prior to going live in production. Only install applications tested to run in a Terminal Services environment. As with print drivers, you will want to test all applications before loading them on production servers. This will guarantee the stability of your farm. DO NOT install applications with users logged in. I highly recommend only installing application during off hours with no users logged on. In fact, my best practice is that before I install any application, I reboot the server to clean the system and then install the application and reboot one more time, whether it needs it or not. In keeping with this practice, I always install applications with no users logged on. Do NOT perform maintenance that requires a reboot during production hours. NEVER perform maintenance during production hours! Use caution when remote administrating MetaFrame XP servers. Some things are better done from the server console. There are no steadfast rules but I highly recommend doing any system modification from the physical. However, you can perform Management Console for MetaFrame XP administration through a session. Notify end-user prior to any downtime, if at all possible. Give them as much notice as possible. Let them feel like you are doing everything you can to make them a part of the system. They will also appreciate that you are not wasting their time. Run disk defragmentation software at least once a month to optimize performance. There are a few great third party defrag products that let you schedule scans. Build a test box to test any change to the system environment. (i.e. policy changes, registry changes, print drivers, application compatibility) Follow ALL change management policies and procedures. In the templates folder you will find a Change Management Log Book that I highly recommend using. This guarantees that you will always know every change made to the system. It will also allow you the ability to roll back changes to assist in troubleshooting. Additionally it covers your behind when others make unwise changes. |