Access to your office desktop from everywhere, all the time
Your data and applications, including Windows, running in our highest tier data center with low latency available 24x7x365
Web-based control panel for immediate setup of new users, applications and services by your administrative users
Office applications for productivity options:
- Open Office: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Base
- Microsoft Office 2007 Standard: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook
- Microsoft Office 2007 Pro Plus: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, InfoPath, and Publisher
PDF creator and Adobe Reader
Private disk space for each user to store confidential documents
Shared disk space to store confidential documents accesible by co-workers
Offsite (500 miles away) daily backup of all data
Retention of backups: 7 daily, 3 weekly, and 3 monthly backups
Real-time Anti-Virus protection from Trend Micro
Real-time Anti-spyware protection from Trend Micro
Live U.S.-based support via telephone and email
Timely, transparent software updates for your Windows desktop and applications, including email and Office suite
Optional:
- Microsoft Exchange 2007 Email Hosting, Microsoft SharePoint Hosting, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Hosting
- Microsoft applications: Expression Web, Project and Visio
- Intuit QuickBooks

Is there a contract or minimum time commitment?

No, you do not sign or commit to a long-term contract. The contract is simply month-to-month and you can cancel at any time without penalty.

Do I need to have a minimum number of users?

No, you can have as few as one user in your organization to use our services.

Can I change plans at any time?

Yes, you can change plans for any user at any time - it's simple: the administrator(s) for your company log into our web-based control panel and can change the plan at any time. The fees are pro-rated for each plan based on the number of days.

Can I mix and match plans for different users?

Yes, different users can be on different hosted desktop plans. For example, two users can be on the Basic Desktop plan, four users on the Standard Desktop plan, and six users on the Premium Desktop plan. And you can easily change any user's plan at any time.

How secure is my data?

About Our Datacenter:
We use the highest type of datacenter, complete with 24x7 security guards, biometric access, card access, lock/keys, and closed-circuit television surveillance with digital storage to ensure multiple layers of physical security. You can read more about our data center here.

About Our Digital Security:
For digital security, we use enterprise clustered firewalls and switches from Cisco to ensure the highest level of protection possible. We are diligent about quickly applying hardware and software updates as they are released by the manufacturers. Our experts focus on keeping your data secure so that you can work worry-free.

What is your SLA or uptime guarantee?

Our Service Level Agreement (SLA) is 99.9% uptime. We guarantee that your cloud desktop is available 99.9% of the time or we will give you a refund. See our Terms of Service for details.

What are the limitations of the Hosted Desktop service?

There are certain limitations that you should know about:

You must use a support client device in order for local printing to work. Generally, this requires a Windows XP SP2, Vista, or 7 based client device. The work-around is to copy or email the file to your local PC and print from there.
While most client devices can connect to the Hosted Desktop just fine, some devices cannot. Please check the support pages, contact our support team, or simply test it.
Multimedia and graphics intensive applications will not work very well. We recommend that you use your local PC or device to play audio and video.
You cannot install applications yourself. Because our customers choose NextDesktop to keep confidential data secure, we lock down the desktop so that users cannot install any applications. This prevents installation of spyware, peer to peer sharing, and other dangerous applications that put your confidential data at risk. However, if there are other applications that you need, please contact us for availability. We add new applications on an ongoing basis - check the web based control panel for the latest list of for fee and free applications.

Setup Questions

Setup Questions:

What do I need to make Hosted Desktops work for my organization?

Any device which can connect to the Internet, such as an existing PC (Linux/Mac/Windows), a SmartPhone (Blackberry/iPhone/J2ME/Palm Pre/Symbian/Windows Mobile), or a small specialized thin client . Even an old PC running Windows 95 or later works. Note that for printing to work, you need a device that is running Windows XP SP2, Vista or later with .Net 3.0 with SP1.
A broadband Internet connection such as DSL, cable, cellular mobile 3G or EVDO, 4G, WiFi, WiMAX, or fiber T1 and T3 lines.

How much bandwidth does my Internet connection need?

This depends largely on the version of your RDP client:

Clients running RDP 6.1 (on Windows 7/XP SP2/Vista SP1 or later with .Net 3.0 SP1) need about 35 kbps of download bandwith per user.
Clients running RDP 6.0 (on Windows XP SP2 or Vista RTM without .Net 3.0 SP1) need about 50 kbps of download bandwith per user.
Clients running RDP 5.2 (on Windows XP RTM/SP1, 2003, 2000, ME, 98, 95) need about 60 kbps of download bandwith per user.

So, an office with 5 users running RDP 6.1 will consume about 175 kbps of download bandwidth.

Can I use my USB drive with a Hosted Desktop?

Yes, you can plug in your existing USB drives into your client device. Once you connect to the Hosted Desktop, the attached USB drive will show up as a new drive letter in Windows. You can then open, save, copy and move documents normally. This works for USB hard drives, flash drives, thumb drives, and jump drives.

Where is the support team based?

All of our operations are based entirely in the United States of America. Our sales and support teams are based in Burlington, MA.

Do you support...

Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/7

Yes, but we strongly recommend Windows XP SP2 or later with .Net 3 SP1. This is necessary for printing; older versions of Windows can access the hosted desktop, but can not print.

SmartPhones: iPhone/BlackBerry/Android/Windows Mobile/Symbian

Yes, we generally support SmartPhones. However, the individual smartphone support varies by the applications that are available on each platform. For example, on the iPhone we only support the Wyse PocketCloud. We are in the process of testing applications on the other devices - please let us know if you have sucess with particular applications.

Mac

Yes, we support Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later. But, Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Tiger) or later is strongly recommended.

Linux

Yes, we support Linux distributions (such as Debian, Fedora, KDE, Knoppix, RedHat, Slackware, and Ubuntu) as long as you can install the latest version of the open source RDesktop client.

Answer here

Thin Clients

While you can use any thin client to connect to our cloud desktop, only thin clients running Windows Embedded Standard (WES) 2009 with .Net 3.0 SP1 installed can print to a local printer.

Technical Questions:

Can I play music, watch video, or use a microphone?

While you can record and play audio and video on your hosted desktop, you will not have a great experience. In general, we recommend that you use your local PC or client device for these functions.

Can I print to the printer in my office or home?

Your hosted desktop uses a technology called EasyPrint. The default printer installed on you local computer will be "passed through" to your hosted desktop when you login. You do not need to install anything on your computer or on your hosted deskto tp be able to print.

Computers with the following operating systems are compatible with EasyPrint:
   •    Windows XP SP2 with .Net 3.0 SP1 and RDP 6.1 update
   •    Windows XP SP3 with .Net 3.0 SP1 or later
   •    Windows Vista SP1 with .Net 3.0 SP1 or later
   •    Windows 7
   •    Windows XP Embedded Standard 2009

Is there a place to store my private files as well as files that I want to share with coworkers?

Yes, every user gets two drives: one for storing private files and the other for storing files that can be shared with coworkers.

Can I customize my desktop background?

No, due to performance reasons, you cannot customize or change your desktop background.

How does the disk quota work?

Depending on the desktop plan, each user gets a certain amount of disk space for storing documents and files. See plan information for quota limits. However, we allow users to exceed the quota. Users are sent an email reminder every night when they've exceeded their quotas. Please note that you will be charged a fee for overages.

What is Open Office?

Open Office is an open source competitor to Microsoft Office applications. It includes Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Base. You can learn more about the applications here.

What applications can I install myself?

You cannot install applications yourself. Because our customers choose NextDesktop to keep confidential data secure, we lock down the desktop so that users cannot install any applications. This prevents installation of spyware, peer to peer sharing, and other dangerous applications that put your confidential data at risk. However, if there are other applications that you need, please contact us for availability. We add new applications on an ongoing basis - check the web based control panel for the latest list of for fee and free applications.

What applications are available?

We offer numerous applications for your hosted office such as Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, InfoPath, Publisher), Microsoft Project, Microsoft Visio, AOL Messenger (AIM), Microsoft Windows Live Messenger (MSN), Yahoo! Messenger, a PDF creator and Adobe reader. Please see our Pricing page for more details. Are there other applications that you need for your business? Please contact us.

Is there a regularly scheduled maintenance window?

Yes, due to the nature of this technology, we reboot all hosted desktop servers once a week to keep performance optimal. The servers are rebooted at 12:30 AM Eastern Time (ET) every Sunday night. In addition, we apply the latest Microsoft security patches on a monthly basis: the Friday after the second Tuesday of every month,

If I disconnect or am forced off, is my work saved?

If you disconnect from your hosted desktop, the session remains open for 30 minutes. After that time, your session is automatically logged off. Most applications do periodically auto-save documents so that you're able to recover your work. However, we strongly recommend that you perform a Log Off when you're done using your cloud desktop to ensure that no data gets lost.

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