Hello World,

Today, we will dig a little bit more in the remoteapp publishing process. We will also discuss about the RemoteApp program folder which I think it’s really a nice addition and a customer requested feature.

In this post, we assume that you have followed the steps described in the previous posts related to RDS

• RDS – Remote Desktop Services Overview – PART I
• RDS – Remote Desktop Services Roles – Part II
• RDS – Quick Install Remote Desktop Service – Part III
• RDS – New RDMS Management Console – Part IV
• RDS – Accessing your RemoteApp – Part V
• RDS – More configuration for RemoteApp Access – Part VI

So, let’s continue our journey into the RDS world : -)

Publishing RemoteApps – The Basics

So far, we have seen how to deploy an RDS Serve in a simple deployment scenario (i.e. all roles hosted on one server).   Now, that you have your infrastructure ready, you might want to publish some useful applications to your users.   As you will see, using the new RDMS console, publishing apps is really easy.

Publishing/Unpublishing RemoteApp

Before publishing apps, you will need to install them on your RDS server in order to make them available to the RemoteApp interface.

To Publish applications to your web interface, you need to publish them through the RDMS console > Collections Node > select your collection

In this console, you have the pane RemoteApp Programs (as shown in the screenshot below)

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If you click on the Tasks button, you can decide to publish/unpublish applications through a wizard

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The Wizard will look for the application that could be installed and will present you with this screenshot. Select the application you want to publish and Press Next

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In the confirmation page, review your settings and Press publish

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Wait for the wizard to publish the application.

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At the completion screen, Review the settings and Press Finish

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When the wizard closes, you can check that your application is listed under the RemoteApp Program pane

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As you can see, in this basic wizard, we were just able to select which application would be published.  There were not settings related to security.   If you need to restrict the usage of remoteapp to specific groups, you will need to go through each remoteapp and configure these additional settings

Additional Configuration Settings for RemoteApp

To see which additional configuration settings are available to you, let’s select one application and right-click on it. You should see the option “Edit Properties”

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In the general page of the Properties dialog box, you can decide to change the name of the application, define a alias make the application visible or not in the web interface or add the application to a remote Program folder.

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This last option (Remote Program folder) is really interesting and this is a new feature available since Windows 2012 version. With this  feature, we have the possibility to create folders which will help you to group remoteApp programs together. I think that really a good feature. In the past, if you had a lot of remoteapp published, it was not always easy to find right away the correct icon and launch your application.

With this new feature, you are basically grouping your applications inside a folder. In our scenario, we will create 2 categories (i.e. folders) called Admin Tools and Utilities. To create this folders, you will simply typ them in the drop down box and then assign them to the applications

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If you go to your web interface, you should see something like this now

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It’s a better and clearer view, don’t you think ?

If you go through the remaining pages of the Edit Properties Dialog box, you will see that you can decide to specify or not parameters when launching your application.

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You can also decide which users/group should have access to the RemoteApp.  As you can see, by default, there is not group defined.  The setting is inherited from the collection session settings.  By default, all users member of the Domain Users group will be able to access the published RemoteApp.  If you want to restrict the access of some application (ex: visio because of licensing costs), you can create a dedicated group (i.e. RemoteApp Visio Users) and authorize only this group to access the visio published application

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Finally, you can configure also the File association type to be used with the RemoteApp

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Final Notes

This is it for this short post.  With the information provided here, you should be able to easily publish/unpublish your applications and decide who should have access to them.   As you have seen, additional configuration settings is done per-application base.   Finally, we have seen  how you could group your remoteapp together by using the Remote program Folders

I hope you enjoy this post

Till next time

See ya