I am looking to be able to have software installed on a server that then the users in the
business I work for would login and have access to those programs from which ever
computer they login to. So basically I want to install software let say a criminal record system, and then have say a group of students that login
and are a part of a group that would have access to the program from the server. The issue I am having is I have students that are moving
from lab to lab and we have different software between labs so I would like to setup a way
for those students to get access to this software from which ever computer they are sitting at. How do I go about it, is it in the development stage of the software or what? Thanks.

What you need is a client server application. This is done at the development stage of the software using TCP/IP or Socket Programming.

csharpjava: What you need is a client server application. This is done at the development stage of the software using TCP/IP or Socket Programming.

Thanks so much, the information u gave me is helpful.

If you want to have access to the application as a whole you can consider using RDP/RDC. Remote Desktop Protocol or Remote Desktop Connection gives you access to remote operating systems without concern for the connection. For example if your application is running on a linux server you can use RDP to connect to the linux server o/s and interact with the application and the whole linux server o/s regardless of your operating system.

dell_net: If you want to have access to the application as a whole you can consider using RDP/RDC. Remote Desktop Protocol or Remote Desktop Connection gives you access to remote operating systems without concern for the connection. For example if your application is running on a linux server you can use RDP to connect to the linux server o/s and interact with the application and the whole linux server o/s regardless of your operating system.

Thanks for d response, I dnt want them to have access to the operating system, let me xplain better on wat I'm trying to achieve. Let's say you have a criminal record management system as the application u want to develop, different users wit their privilege assign to them, some can view only, some edit only, some add only, etc, the admin over sees everything. Now what I want is from any system in the office, a user sees the program n click on it, a login window appear asking the user for username n password which will now establish connection with the server to authenticated the user, if true, a window will appear to allow the user perform task assigned to them, such as adding record, the added record goes to the DB in the server, to view record comes from the DB in the server, etc. I developed the app 3 months ago, but I'm looking at adding the client server stuff to it. Thanks.

You are on the right path with Client-Server suggestion. Just do it that way and the objective will be achieved.

Otuabaroku:
You are on the right path with Client-Server suggestion. Just do it that way and the objective will be achieved.

I've not done anything on client - server app before, that's why I'm looking for suggestions on how it is done.

What language are you looking at? If you look at the banking industry they use similar to what you want to do.

Ok, are you looking at doing it yourself? Then study Java or other network programming language you are comfortable with . It has network programming features you can explore to achieve your goal. But if the time to get the project done is limited, i suggest you contract it out. Some link that may be of help is http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/networking/index.html . You can google others.

I have done this sort of stuff before, I used C++....
You should understand sockets forst though...
But regardless of the language, the procedure should be something like this...
Create your server, the software you want as the backend (the criminal software) should come with the server in built
or
you can have them on different processes on the same system in such a way that when the server gets a request, it calls the criminal software on the command line and returns the result to the user....
If u are worried about where to keep the host software, you can keep it anywhere(the internet, another computer in the same room, the same computer as the client) the most important thing is to remember the IP and port the server listens to cos thats all the client cares about...
The client should be able to communicate with the server in a way that the server will understand or in a way that your server can parse... Its entirely up to you to provide your request diction. For example, your request can be like this:
"CHECK allcriminals.xml*year=2012;age=50
access type: user
auth: yes
client name: crim client
"
in the above request, an example,( I strongly advice you use normal http request format(GET HTTP/1.1)), a user is trying get all criminals arrested in year 2012 that are 50yrs old.
So you bundle the above request into a byte array create a socket, and connect to the host and port ur server is listening to, then you write the request.
Your server on reading the request (it should get a handle of the socket that sent the request so that it can reply the socket) should probably check if authentication is false which in that case it will return an error message of some sort to the socket.
This is straight forward sir.

@ lordZOUGA, thanks so much, I'm doing some reading on sockets. Then I'll proceed from there.

Why not just use a web application?

To me it suits your purpose and has the widest reach. If you start your development with mobile devices in mind, only one web app is enough and will run on desktop and laptop PCs, Androids, Ipads, and more.

All you need to get started is a PHP framework like yii or Zend. You do the coding for the core application then for the other functionality like user management you mentioned, you can download extensions thereby saving time and development costs.

If your application will not be run on the internet, you can have an in-house server with preferably Linux to serve your app to clients.

Hope this helps a little.

Yeah, thanks, itz now going to be a web app since they later informed me dt they will like to push it online next year but it should work locally now, so I'm gonna create a local server. My choice of programming language and database is asp.net with mssql server, the app is a transaction app where you credit and debit accounts, I dnt want to use php for it, security is zero, I'm thinking of java sef, but I love asp.net with c#. Thanks.

so how far have you gone?

This depends on the programming language you use to develop the software. For example, the way you will set client/server application for vb.net differs from java programming language client/server set up