Thursday, April 12, 2012

RemoteApp improvements in Windows Server 8

There have been numerous improvements regarding the way end-users experience RemoteApps in Windows Server 8. In this blog post, I’ll discuss some of the improvements that might at first seem very small but will definitely help end users to adopt Remote Apps even more.

With Windows 7, new features were introduced, such as grouping of applications, pinning, tabbed windows, overlay icons etc. However, RemoteApps didn’t allow full compatibility with these newly introduced features. Windows Server 8 (Beta) crosses the bridge and has the capability to allow compatibility with these features!

Users can now also pin RemoteApp applications to the client taskbar just like they were locally installed applications.

Users can now easily spot the difference between RemoteApps and workspaces by a unique icon. This identifier is in the form of an icon overlay in the form of the Remote Desktop logo.

Users can now see a change in the status of an application as icon overlays is now also supported for Remote Apps.

And users can now also see the difference between multiple instances of an application by being able to see tabs in the RemoteApp preview.

It's good to see that these features made it to the Windows Server 8 (Beta) release, it definitely makes Remote Apps more user-friendly!

4 comments:

  1. can you provide more details? updates since this post, changes in RP version etc?

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  2. I'm having a very hard time figuring out how to do this (enterprise versions). The option to pin to taskbar is greyed out in the explorer ribbon and absent on the right click menu when trying to do it. If i move the rdp files to a different folder than the one they get put in from the rdweb page, then it lets me, but the remoteapp won't work.

    Is this even in the final version?

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    Replies
    1. As far as I know pinning Remote Apps is not available in Windows Server 2012. It has been on the feature list in April 2012, but it seems that the feature did not make it to the final build. Remote Apps can be pinned on the new ("metro-style") start screen though.

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