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Publishing Office 2010 in Windows 2008 R2 RDS

We are considering using Windows 2008R2 terminal servers to publish Office 2010 to our user base.  Our base consists of over 1000 xp workstations with either Office 97 or Office 2003 installed.  These XP workstations are NOT joined to the domain. They belong to different workgroups. We are considering publishing Word, Outlook and Excel to most of the workstation. A few workstations would get PowerPoint.

A complication is our Novell 6.5 sp6 file servers.  Most of our files are located on Novell mapped drives.  We are in the process of migrating from Novell to Windows 2008. This migration will probably take 2-3 years to complete.  

Here are some questions we have.

1.  Are there white papers, tech documents or blogs related to publishing Office 2010 on Windows 2008 R2 servers.

2.  How does a user open a document on their local desktop? Our testing does not show an easy to open docs on the local desktop.

3.  How to see Novell mapped drives in the published app?  Our testing shows they do not. map.  We only see the home drive mapping set by AD and redirected drives.  For example  G on PC.

4.  Do we or should we join the XP workstations to the domain?  We realize if they are not members of the domain the user will have to log on to the published app.

5.  Publish Apps certs.  Advantage to using them?   Will certs eliminate the logon?
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Coralon
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Coralon ,

Excellent answers.

1.  We are already have a Citrix farm.  We want to avoid using Citrix to publish Office 2010 due to the cost of the licensing.  It is serious serious big bucks.

2.  Got the Novell login script to run using Client 2 SP1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 (IR6) by enabling TSClientAutoAdminLogon.  Check out this link.   http://www.novell.com/documentation/vista_client/vista_client_admin/?page=/documentation/vista_client/vista_client_admin/data/bjy513p.html

3.  You are correct about the domain memebership.  All of my testing has been from a Windows XP sp3 PC in a workgroup.

We are guessing we will need 20-30 RD servers to host  In addition to the remote apps config, now I need to learn about RD Gateway, RD Web and RD Connection Broker.  
Any advise you have about those things would be greatly appreciated.
I do not believe that RDS has an option for content redirection.   Your only real option for that circumstance is just to open it up through the client drive redirection.    I have never done the RDS gateway/web/connection broker.  

I would strongly recommend you guys do a pilot first, to get a sense of the scale you can expect.  I was a Citrix consultant for well over a decade, and whenever I was asked "how many users/server" the answer is always "it depends".   You need to pilot it first to get an idea of scalability for your applications and your users.  For example - a secretary that types 100 wpm+ is going to use more processing power than someone who types 30 wpm.  That's the kind of thing that is tough to guestimate.

Coralon
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Thanks