Summary

In this chapter you learned that Microsoft 2003 Server brings with it a much more feature rich and higher performing version of Terminal Services by providing true color support, audio support, local drive mapping, local printer redirection, better support for low bandwidth connections, greater scalability, session directory, and more.

You have also learned the importance of taking the time to properly build and deploy Terminal Services. All the way from partitioning drives , installing applications, applying file permissions, and leveraging group policies, to other aspects of Windows 2003 such as load balancing and clustering to provide high performance, highly available, and secure server-based computing solution for one's enterprise.

The Terminal Services functions in Windows Server 2003 give you a good indication of things to come from Microsoft. After seeing Terminal Services in Windows 2003 one can see a future where employees will be able to attach to airport kiosks to RDP into their office Terminal Servers, look at their e-mail, and synch that e-mail onto a PDA through a redirected port. Applications will talk to each other even though they are running on separate terminal servers. There is already talk of technologies to allow you to move live user sessions from one Terminal Server to another so that the server can be taken down for maintenance.

As the pendulum continues to swing back and forth between centralized and distributed computing, each cycle of the pendulum brings more and more functionality to the end user. Terminal Services continues to be a valuable and exciting technology that makes the end user experience better and your life easier.