Employees can securely connect to corporate applications from any location, ensuring productivity for remote and hybrid workers. IT team can maintain and update software centrally, reducing the need for individual workstation updates. We can deploy thin clients instead of high-performance computers.
Pros
Remote Access to Enterprise Applications
Centralized Management and Software Deployment
Running Legacy Applications
Cons
Performance of remote display when on limited bandwidth or high latency
Simplified provisioning or cloning golden image
Easiest way to deploy application within a server farm
Likelihood to Recommend
Remote Desktop Services provides access to work environments from any device. This allows us to ensure business continuity in case of disaster. It provides admins more control over access and security. Remote Desktop Services simplifies software updates and compliance management by reducing the need to act on end users devices.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (Information Technology & Services company, 1001-5000 employees)
Remote Desktop Services is a handy feature in Windows OS like Windows Server, Windows 7, etc. It is being used in our organization to connect to our server and local PCs. The main problem it addresses is to let a user/administrator take remote of another PC/server to perform various works like configuration, troubleshooting, etc.
Pros
Easy to use.
Good customization options like the screen size of remote session window, remote audio settings, etc.
Cons
The Window of the Remote desktop connection sometimes does not get maximized to full size sometimes and it is hard to make it sometimes. There should be an option to display a full-size window for easier working.
Likelihood to Recommend
Remote Desktop services are well suited for people looking to connect to Local computers/Servers after connecting to VPN or Local Area Network. It is easy to use and performs superbly without any issues. However, it does not have support for connecting to Non-Windows-based Devices and Applications like Teamviewer beat RDP when it comes to connecting to machines outside one's network.
VU
Verified User
Director in Corporate (Information Technology & Services company, 51-200 employees)
We as an entire company started using Remote Desktop Services about 6 years ago. We wanted to provide a way for multiple staff working outside the office to have access to data files on the network. The simplest method we came up with was to setup Remote Desktop Services with Microsoft Terminal Services. All the applications would be installed on a single server. This server also has all our network drives mapped providing access to all network data files. Our staff then can remote into this server using Remote Desktop Services. The server now acts like a terminal giving our staff full use of the applications like Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suites to work on the data files located on the network drives.
Pros
Remote Desktop Services does an excellent job in providing a way for our staff to be working outside the office as if they're actually sitting inside the office. As long as the staff has an internet connection and a computer, he can use Remote Desktop Services to access files on our network.
Remote Desktop Services also eliminates a need to have a very fast internet connection to access files on the company network. Once a Remote Desktop Service session is established, the only bandwidth it takes up is the transfer of images you see on the display. It's like surfing on the web because you are using the company server as the resource to run the applications.
Remote Desktop Services provides a way for users to transfer files back & forth to/from staff's offsite laptop to/from the company network . There would be times when staff forget to copy a particular file onto the laptop for a presentation. So the way to retrieve the data from the network is to establish a Remote Desktop Session and then using Windows standar copy & paste feature to transfer the file from the network onto their laptop for use.
Cons
Remote Desktop Services currently does not support multiple monitors on the terminal server. Unlike other applications such as Teamviewer, there's no feature to toggle between multiple screens even if they were connected to the terminal server.
Remote Desktop Services should provide an option to scale up or down the screen size after a connection is established. Currently you can only adjust the screen size prior to a connection is established. So you'll have to take a best guess at what display screen resolution will fit best on your screen.
Remote Desktop Services should offer some kind of menu to send special key strokes like Ctrl+Alt+Del to the terminal server. Currently the substitute for that particular combination is Ctrl+Alt+End. But I have yet to discover a replacement for other combination keystrokes such as Alt+PrintScrn.
Likelihood to Recommend
Remote Desktop Services is well suited for companies where staff may have to quite often work from outside the office. With Remote Desktop Services established, now staff can have access to all their needed applications to modify all the data files on their network servers without having to step foot into the office. But I would not recommend attempting to copy very large data files back & forth between the offsite laptop and the network server. Even if you have access to very fast broadband internet speeds, the transfer rates are still not going to be as fast as you're sitting at your desk inside the office local area network environment.
It's used by the whole organization. We are mainly using it to allow us the possibility of connecting to a remote server on which are standing the Data Warehouse we are managing. Sometimes we also use it to connect to our servers while we are standing inside the customer organization.
Pros
Easy Configuration
Fast Connection
Very Good Reliability
Low Memory and Resource Usage
Cons
The GUI interface is outdated
Sometimes there are unexpected crashes during work sessions
Difficult to customize
Not really intuitive
Likelihood to Recommend
RDS Is very well suited when you need to make a fast connection to a remote server without spending too much time in searching and configuring. RDS is not well suited for complex operations.
We are currently hosting three separate farms across approximately 20 servers. One farm dedicated to a published shared remote desktop (RDSH), one farm dedicated to hosing a number of RemoteApps (HEAT, Exchange Management Console, etc), and a dedicated RemoteApp farm for Elite Enterprise. In conjunction with the Remote Desktop Gateway server, Remote Desktop Connection Broker, and Remote Desktop Web Access server, we give users the ability to do their work from wherever they are most comfortable and ease the upgrade burden on our staff when it comes to upgrading particularly cumbersome software like Elite Enterprise. The applications available to our users via our RDS platform cover about 30-50% of our employees with plans to potentially expand that further as budget and time dictate.
Pros
Relative ease of setup: in comparison to some of the other solutions on the market (Citrix, etc.), Remote Desktop Services is rather easy to set up and get configured in your environment.
Feature set: Microsoft offers a good deal of the same features many competitors offer in the same space including a mobile app and the ability to have a "native" app feel for a remote application.
Inexpensive Licensing: in comparison to other solutions on the market Remote Desktop Services is inexpensive.
Move LOB applications closer to their server counterparts: this goes for all remote solutions, but if you have a line of business application that makes a great deal of calls across the network to your data center, your remote office users will likely benefit from the performance and stability side by moving those client side applications into the data center.
Cons
No centralized management: unlike other products on the market, Remote Desktop Services in 2008r2 provides no single management console. Users are managed through a console on the connection broker, web apps are managed on a per server basis (even when those servers belong to a farm).
Image Management: because no use of an agent like PNTools is made, bringing up servers and adding them to the farm is inconvenient. Static IPs are a must and round-robin load balancing is really your only option with the connection broker. Updating a farm of 5+ servers becomes a chore, but still easier than updating 2000+ machines.
Still a very green product: while Microsoft offers a lot of the same features as the big guys, it's obvious that Remote Desktop Services is still in it's infancy and has a lot of room for growth. I have discovered and requested fixes for a number of bugs in the mobile app alone - something about the QA process for these apps seems to be lacking.
Likelihood to Recommend
- Do you have a well developed and managed application list? Without an understanding of the applications that are actually in use in your environment on a day to day basis, a shared remote desktop will not be very useful for your end users and will end up not providing a very good ROI. - Are there applications that your users would benefit from being able to access from anywhere, or are there applications in your environment that are installed on a significant amount of machines and are cumbersome to update? In both cases you may see benefits to migrating those applications to a virtual environment. - Is your network connectivity good across all sites - including low latency? RDS and remote desktop in general rely on solid network connections to maintain peak performance, although low bandwidth and high latency still work.
