Yes this is finally available to anyone. And now!

Well, sort of.

As I discussed with many people at BriForum, we are working on a tool to record RDP sessions so you can watch/play back later all your user(s) have been doing all day long on your TS!

The software is on its early development stages BUT it is ready to be tested so you can get a ‘preview’ of what to expect when it is released. Right now you need to install it on a separate machine (not your TS) but you can record all sessions going to that TS if you want.

The planned features for the final version are:

- User session recording based on username, time of the day, application that was launched and so on.

- Runs as a service on the terminal server.

- Records to the local drive or any other network location.

- Web interface for the administrators so they can watch what was recorded in Macromedia Flash format!

And much more.

The software will be licensed on a PER SERVER basis and volume discounts and site licenses will be available. The suggested MSRP will be US$ 599 per server (assuming you have 50 users per server this is less than US$ 12 per user!).

This is simply a must have for every single company out there, worried about security and auditing policies compliance.

If you are interested on testing the software, please email us at RecordTS@NOSPAM-TSFactory.ca (remove the NOSPAM-) with some details about your environment size, potential number of servers and if this is a software your company would potentially purchase if it was available today.

Cheers!

Yes, as everyone now knows, Microsoft is buying Softricity. I guess everything anyone could say about this is already at Doug’s Brown website so just stop there to read what that means for Citrix and the whole Terminal Services industry!

My personal thoughts are this is great and Softricity in a way will be the next big thing at the corporate world and one day, with extra high speed anywhere, anytime and at very reasonable cost, it may kill Terminal Services as we know today.

Just noticed this morning that 2X updated its ThinClientServer to support seamless windows applications running of Windows terminal services with their ApplicationServer software.

I know they have a terrible name for a product that makes you think they have some sort of server for providing Linux desktops/applications. That is not the case. The ThinClientServer actually deploys/manages a small footprint Linux OS that is customized to work as a Thin Client OS. This means you can get rid of Windows and any other OS that is not really suitable for a Thin Client solution and replace it with a centralized, fully managed solution.

The neat things I think are the Citrix integration (yes, you can remote boot your PCs with it and after your users logon they will see the apps they have access to on their desktop and/or start menu, a la PNAgent. And now they did the same for RDP so if  you have no Citrix you can still have the same but with applications coming from the 2X ApplicationServer. And keep in mind this is all FREE for 5 users or less so the small shops out there can actually have a very decent thin client desktop management solution with published applications in seamless windows mode for FREE.

If they had a better name…

Two great freewares that most people do not know and/or do not pay attention how cool/useful they are, should be used everyday not only for Terminal Services access/control but on any other machine you are accessing using RDP.

These are SecureRDP and the 2X Client. Let me explain what they do and where I think people should use them.

SecureRDP: this tool works as a filter for incoming RDP connections. It blocks the connection before you can even see the logon screen asking for your username/password. You can filter by IP, Computer Name, MAC address and even client version number. This tool should be used not only on TSs but on Exchange Servers, DCs etc! Today if a user, looking over the admin shoulder, gets his password, he will be able to logon to a DC and do whatever he wants. With SecureRDP the admin would be able to filter the connection to allow only the admin PC MAC address so even with the admin username/password that user would NOT be able to get to the DC. How cool is that?

2X Client: This is what the Microsoft RDP Client should have been since day one. The main difference is a tab - Network. And what a difference this little tab makes! You can use this client to connect to any TS machine EVEN if there is a proxy server somewhere on your network! It supports SOCKS/HTTP proxies and works great. I remember the hassle I had to go through years ago when such thing did not exist and I had to connect to my TS at home from a customer site, where they had a proxy server! I was able to do it but this little gem would have saved me hours. Highly recommended.

And the best part? These are completely FREE. It cannot get better than that.

Cheers!