Providing Centralized Application Access

Mobile users can be a pain to support. Although virtual private network (VPN) technologies have made remote access simpler, giving remote users full access to your internal network from over the Internet is often not the best solution. With the improvements to Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008, however, users (both remote and on the network) can securely access business applications running on your Terminal Servers and have the same kind of experience as if these applications were installed locally on their machines.

Terminal Services Gateway (TS Gateway) lets remote users securely punch through your perimeter firewall and access Terminal Servers running on your corpnet. Terminal Services RemoteApp enables remoting of individual application windows instead of the whole desktop so that an application that is actually running on a Terminal Server looks and feels to the user as if it were running on her own desktop. And Terminal Services Web Access makes application deployment a snap-the user visits a Web site, clicks on a link or icon, and launches an application on a Terminal Server located somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.

Interested in learning more about these new features and enhancements to Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008? Flip to Chapter 8, “Terminal Services Enhancements,” and you’ll find a ton of information on the subject.