Enhancing the environment

Now that you have a TS environment up and running and with multiple servers load balanced (I assume you got the 2X LoadBalancer), what else can we do to enhance the overall end-user experience? Actually there are probably many things that could be done but I will just list a few of them.

Seamless Windows

For those not familiar with this very common term in the TS world, this is very easy to understand and as always, a picture is worth a thousand words! So let’s take a quick look at the following screenshots.

Fig. 66
Seamless Windows Application

Fig. 67
Non-seamless Windows Application

As you can see, in the first screenshot Microsoft Outlook seems to be running ‘locally’; there is no window frame around it. On the other hand, on the second screenshot, Notepad is running but you can see the TS start button and task bar, and the window frame (with the close, minimize and restore buttons on it) around it. Not as ‘seamless’ as the first example where the application actually seems to be running locally on my computer!

The ability to give individual applications to the users instead of a ‘Full desktop window’ is called application publishing with seamless windows. The 2X ApplicationServer product allows you to ‘publish’ individual applications that will look and behave as if they were locally installed on the user PC. This is not only much cleaner to the user (as they do not have ‘two taskbars’ anymore!) but a much better way to introduce your users to the benefits of Server Based Computing. All this at very little cost.

Firewall Friendly Access

In many cases you may need to provide your users (or partners for that matter) access to your TS infrastructure over the Internet and as we know, sometimes these users/partners will be connecting from networks where you have little or no control whatsoever. The typical end result of that is port TCP 3389 being completely blocked and in more restricted places, only HTTP or HTTPS traffic will be allowed. This means even if you change the TS listening port (yes, you can do that) to something else like 21 (trying to trick the firewall that this may be FTP traffic.) it will not work.

So what is the solution? Well the best way is to encapsulate (or tunnel) RDP traffic over HTTPS. This basically establishes an HTTPS connection from the client to the TS.

Good to know but what should I use? One of the first and now most mature products in the market is the 2X LoadBalancer. It not only load balances your TSs in an intelligent manner but also provides a complete RDP over HTTPS solution for your clients! When used with the 2X ApplicationServer, users will be able to access individual applications (‘published applications’) over HTTPS, making the solution completely firewall friendly.