Microsoft IT Professional Blog

As you all know the Terminal Services role enables your users to access Windows applications that are installed on a terminal server remotely without them having them to install them in their system or access complete Windows desktop hosted in the server, excellent to have remote users log in using thin client computers that have no data stored on them and avoiding the risk of those computers being stolen and having information compromised.

With Windows Server 2008, Microsoft introduced 2 new Terminal Server role services that provide even further flexibility to the terminal service roles these are:

• TS RemoteAPP - Allows programs installed in Terminal Services to be accessed remotely and appear as if they where running on the local computer.  The user can just hit the start menu and open the remote application in his desktop very similar to how Citrix solutions allows access to published application, the feature of RemoteAPP that most impacted me is the fact that I can associate file type entries in my local registry let’s say .doc to open up a RemoteAPP just by double clicking a .doc file.
• TS Gateway - This role service uses RDP over HTTPS to establish a secure, encrypted connection between remote users on the Internet and the internal network resources.

Some of the features that have received an overhaul in Windows Server 2008 that are worth mentioning are:

• TS Web Access - Building on TS RemoteAPP, TS Web Access allows you to access applications on a terminal server over the web, without having to install an ActiveX controller like in past instances of TS Web Access since this control is already a part of the RDC bundled with Vista and Windows Server 2008.
• TS Session Broker - This is mostly a new feature in Server 2008, however you could manually do some work on 2003 to get a session broker to work and load balance sessions between multiple terminal servers in an active directory environment based on Server 200.
• TS Printing - The printing section of terminal servers has had a major overhaul by the addition of the Terminal Services Easy Print printer driver and a Group Policy setting that enables you to redirect only the default client printer.

I could probably go on writing more about each of the previously mentioned features however I think there is already a good set of documentation available in the links provided in this article and in the articles the Microsoft Performance Team was publishing prior to the launch of Windows Server 2008.