Terminal Services in Longhorn

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I still do love the Server Based Computing technology and we are making the product even better within the next release of our server product longhorn.

Last week there was a chat with our Terminal Server Product team, unfortunately I missed it. If you also missed it I found a good article on Brian Madden his site that wraps-up what the changes are on Terminal Services.

These are some of the changes:

  • Application Publishing with client-side file type associations
  • Seamless Windows
  • A Terminal Server Gateway (TSG)
  • Intelligent Avalon/WinFX Remoting
  • A Unified Management Console
  • Redirection of Plug-n-Play devices with UDMF drivers
  • Major Reworking of the Logon Process
  • Per-User Licenses will be Tracked
  • Web interface
  • RDP 6
  • A Refined Windows System Resource Manager (WSRM)
  • WMI Interface for Everything
  • RDP Virtual Channel Tuning.

The above features are discussed in more detail here .

 

Personally I think we are still far away from the feature set Citrix has onto their Presentation Server, but we have now some interesting features which makes Terminal Services without presentation server more useful in smaller environments. Citrix is really an Enterprise management layer onto TS.

Longhorn Terminal Server in combination with the recently announced Windows fundamentals for Legacy PC's (which is basically a stripped down Windows XP) or with full thin clients can save many customers money onto their TCO and will also extend the lifecycle of their PC's. With the acquisition of Softricity you could also improve the application installation, compatibility and/or coexistence on server based computing environments. 

I know from my many years of SBC experience that application deployments on Terminal Servers can be very difficult, not only the deployment but also how to manage all those different applications. I coming months I will setup Longhorn with TS and Softricity in my test lab.

Mmmm with all those products coming up I will have to choose which I will test.

 

Technorati Tags: Longhorn, TerminalServer, Softricity