Our company is heavily dependent upon MS terminal services. Our owner does a lot of traveling with his family and wants to have a "personal" terminal server that he, his wife and kids can use. The IT management company who manages our server farm told him they would do this for $6000 up front and $250 in maintenance a month.

This seems like a golden opportunity for yours truly, the only linux & open source nut in the company. Problem is, I've never tried something like this. I've wanted to...just haven't had the time.

What do folks recommend? Their needs are:

Email (owner is a huge fan of Outlook)
Office suite
Printing to local printer if possible
Perhaps something similar to MapPoint (Microsoft product)

It doesn't have to be a terminal server type solution. Maybe a company that offers cheap terminal server / citrix accounts. Although I really would like to set up a linux terminal server at his house that he can access from the road.

Have read here: http://www.ltsp.org/ ?

I thought LTSP was for diskless workstations booting over the network. I need something more along the lines of our owner accessing terminal services in his hotel room using his windows xp laptop.

If the LTSP has the ability to connect to the server using remote desktop software I'll certainly dig deeper.

Now what our owner wants may not be practical. I'd love to give him a linux laptop and teach him all about ssh but that's not going to happen. The easiest thing to do would give them all GoToMyPC accounts and call it a day. But he has it in his head that his kids will have their homework stored on a terminal server, his wife will have to do lists, Christmas letters and that sort of thing.

What do you mean by "terminal server"?

Sounds to me like you want a decent VPN solution - does that sound right? Hook up from the road, see network shares, all that sort of thing.

Sounds more like Samba over VPN ?
Depends on what he's using the server for. If its just fileserving it could even be SFTP/SSHFS.

That's kind of what I was thinking - I assume they take laptops or something with all the apps.

I think Samba over VPN is a possible solution. And that would certainly make printing easier. I'll try working up something from that angle.

The closer I'm able to get to what's "familiar" to him the more likely he'll be to adopt it. He has his heart set on his very own terminal server so presenting him with a working alternative may not fly. But it's nothing new. I've been down this road with him a few times.