Seemless application deployment with RDP Client

[dhicks]

Hello All,

Does anyone know how I get RDP / Remote Desktop / Terminal Services client to connect to a Terminal Services server, run a single applications (SIMS) and not display a standard red "close" button at the top of the window? Actually, I'd like to hide the whole window if possible so it looks to the user as though they are just running SIMS, and when they click the "close" button SIMS just closes.

At the moment, the user has a choice of two close buttons - SIMS' small grey one and Windows' larger red one. If they click SIMS' small grey close button SIMS will close and the RDP session will automatically logoff and go away, but if they click the red close button they will simply close the current RDP connection, leaving SIMS open (and consuming memory, I assume) on the server. It would be nice to avoid to much confusion amoungst end users and just give them a button which does a close-SIMS-and-log-off.

Can this be sorted out with the standard Windows RDP client, or is there a third party application suitible somewhere?

--
David Hicks

[binky]

Windows Server 2008 can do this using RemoteApp, or check out 2XApplicationServer (2X Thin client computing software: deploy & manage thin clients)

[spc-rocket]

Windows Server 2008 can do this using RemoteApp, or check out 2XApplicationServer (2X Thin client computing software: deploy & manage thin clients)

Agreed, either 2008 or 2x Application server is the way to go. Citrix is also an option but it may be costly, then the other two.

Ash.

[DrPerceptron]

Does RDP not automagically launch itself in fullscreen mode?

I've never used TS though so I don't know if it's any different?

[Ric_]

My preferred option is to install XenApp It's really cool too because the application appears to run on the local machine keeping local printers available, drag'n'drop and even interacting with local copies of Office! Have you ever seen SIMS appear to be running on Linux too

The cheaper option for you would be to use a GPO to logout disconnected sessions after X minutes.

[dhicks]

Oh, bother. Sorry, should have said we don't have any actual money to do this... I think the cheapest option would simply be to upgrade the server to Windows Server 2008 (around £100) and use RemoteApp.

The cheaper option for you would be to use a GPO to logout disconnected sessions after X minutes.

That sounds like a good idea - we only have a dozen or so SIMS users, so this isn't really that big a deal anyway. To be honest it probably wouldn't matter if each user's SIMS client was simply left running the whole time, but I figured I might as well try and sort it all out nicely if I could. If the Bursar reckons we can't afford the £100 for Server 2008 I'll do the GPO thing. Any further details / pointers to instructions at all?

--
David Hicks

[Arthur]

Does anyone know how I get RDP / Remote Desktop / Terminal Services client to connect to a Terminal Services server, run a single applications (SIMS) and not display a standard red "close" button at the top of the window? Actually, I'd like to hide the whole window if possible so it looks to the user as though they are just running SIMS, and when they click the "close" button SIMS just closes.

You could hack mstsc.exe so that when a user clicks the Windows close button a message pops up telling them to log off instead. It's also very easy to completely remove the OK button, and then rename Cancel to OK forcing them to logoff from the RDP session properly.

[dhicks]

You could hack mstsc.exe

Now that is what I call a solution! :-)

--
David Hicks

[binky]

Now that is what I call a solution! :-)

--
David Hicks

actually, take a look at this! CodeProject: Extending Microsoft's Terminal Services Client To Provide Seamless Windows. Free source code and programming help