The DAAS technology is very interesting to me as we have some computer labs that are approaching 7 years of age and can use an upgrade.  Recently I have fell in love with the Chrome OS, very fast and the hardware is cheap.  I have heard of districts replacing there labs with Chromeboxes or Chromebooks and then configuring an RDP or DAAS service for students that need a full windows experience. Have any of the other Tech Directors had any luck with this approach?  If so I am curious about the make/model of devices and/or type of DAAS technology they used.  The DAAS solutions I investigated seemed pricey.  

Similar to Stan we deployed a Terminal Server farm and extended the life out of our PCs (we just used Group Policy to lock them down).  We were able to do this as we have a VMWare data-center that is primarily used to serve these "Virtual Desktops" to our faculty and students.

As we've had this data center for 3 years now and annual support agreements are going to start becoming costly for us, I'm starting the conversations about possibly moving these servers to Microsoft Azure or something like that so we'd essentially have our own DAAS with out the datacenter overhead (and hopefully a cheaper OpEx).

If we do move, I'd like to do something more like a VDI setup, so utilizing the Office 365 functionality (which is really designed around everyone having their own PC and a terminal server with and traditional file server seems to "complicate" matters).

Also remember if you go this route, things like Windows movie maker just won't work in terminal server (we can barely run photoshop in the "thin" graphics lab).  There are a lot of educational apps that will not work in terminal server that used to work.  Also, culturally, when we went this route (before I started here) the teachers felt all of those tools they had in the classroom were now gone and their computers simply became Attendance and MS office machines instead of the educational tools, they should be.  I'm hoping to replace that "lost spark" with iPads/Apple TVs for the teachers in the coming year.

I'm also curious if anyone is using something with ChromeOS as a thin client, I generally buy a Windows 7 Embedded thin client when one of our re purposed PCs die, but they seem to be more effort than they are worth and you still need a windows license which can impact assumed cost savings.