Chapter 13: Application Access Portals

Overview

Simple Web clients that allow Terminal Services sessions to be started only when the sessions are embedded in Web pages are not sufficiently capable to meet the requirements of many corporate environments. Only when functions are added to facilitate personalization and structured graphical presentation of Web pages with the application icons does this technology becomes attractive for the respective target group . Security and scalability of the appropriate infrastructure are also important issues in this context. Special Web applications for the creation of dynamic Web pages ”application access portals ”are one possible solution, enabling the integration of terminal servers in corporate environments.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• What are application access portals and what can they be used for? The first part of this chapter serves as an introduction to this topic and presents the features that should be included in an ideal portal environment for terminal servers.

• The second part details various portal products by Citrix and New Moon, including architecture, installation, configuration, and the relevant clients.

• Finally, we highlight available alternatives to the standard portal products and where the trend is moving in this respect.