Differences Between VEC RDP and TC1 / VP1 with VRL

Author: Eric Vasbinder

New Capabilities Available

As the newest cloud solution in our toolkit, TC1 contains a number of solutions that are not available for VEC customers, such as:

• Viewpoint Analytics

• Automatic Invoicing

• VRL Itself

• Many more that are in development

In addition, for some VEC customers who are currently on purely VEC Office levels of VEC, TC1 / VP1 contracts will also add significant functionality for field and project management, providing solutions such as HR Portal, Field Management, Financial Controls, and Team Project Management.

What's Missing?

For TC1 customers who are coming NEW into the Viewpoint cloud-hosting universe, they will, with rare exceptions, not be able to use Viewpoint RDP-based client application hosting.

HOWEVER, for existing VEC RDP customers who move to TC1, they will be able to continue to use Vista as an RDP published application, while slowly migrating their end users to use VRL. There is no time limit or deadline on that migration at this time.

Back end Architectural Differences

Both TC1 and VEC RDP use the same back end architecture design, including virtual machine naming, NSG and networking structure, automation scripts and more. The only differences are as follows:

• VRL: The Vista Remote Link (VRL) reverse proxy server is installed by default in all TC1 environments, enabling the Vista rich client and associated third party apps to run on customer's local workstations.

• RDP: NEW TC1 customers have a bare minimum configuration and processing power for their terminal server instance, which is only designed for Trimble Viewpoint use, and by exception use (approval required) for a few customer end users in extreme latency and networking scenarios.

Front-end Differences

The most substantive difference between VEC RDP and modern, VRL-based clouds that will be noticed by end users is the use of Vista Remote Link (VRL). With the use of VRL, client-side applications no longer need to be hosted in our cloud, on our RDP Terminal Services. Instead, they are hosted locally on local customer workstations, along with all client-side applications, such as Microsoft Office, Bluebeam, Adobe Acrobat, Crystal Reports Builder, SSMS, Spreadsheet Server, and more.

For Vista Itself

The differences between RDP and VRL for Vista itself, from an end user perspective, are listed out in the following cloud FAQ article: Detailed End User Differences between RDP and Vista Remote Link (VRL)

For Third-Party Client-side Integrations

As mentioned above, client side integrations for TC1 customers are usually hosted locally on end user's local workstations, or in a customer-managed client-side environment in the same datacenter as the customer's Vista server, such as an Azure Virtual Desktop instance. There are two types of integrations on the client side that should be considered: ones needing and ones that do NOT need direct Vista database access.

Please see these two articles for more detail:

• Client-Side Integrations (Customers Using VRL) NOT Needing Vista Database Access

• Client Side Direct Integrations: SSMS, Crystal Reports, Spreadsheet Server

NOTE: If you would like to investigate the use of Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), please see the following Microsoft link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/getting-started-feature?tabs=new-aadds

Client Documents and File System Stores

Client documents, such as Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, estimate files, signed contracts, and more are often stored in network file shares by our customers. In the case of customers of our older cloud solutions, such as VFC, many thousands of documents are often stored in our cloud due to the focus of that cloud environment on IT Outsourcing / providing a complete hosting of all client-side activity. This complicates a move to TC1 for VFC customers. For customers of VEC RDP, this is often less of a concern, since these customers end up using locally stored documents much more frequently as a result of VEC RDP being set up to use published applications, where there is no "tempting" virtual desktop in which to store files.