Publishing Applications on a Terminal Server

In previous versions of Windows Terminal Services, you couldn’t launch single applications, just a desktop. To run an application, you launched a remote desktop and launched the application from there. For complete desktop replacement (as with thin clients) this was fine, but for PC environments in which users might be (and usually were) running both local and remote applications, it meant remembering which window an application was running in. It was a bit like using a multi-monitor computer where you could see only one monitor at a time.

Windows Server 2008, of course, adds TS RemoteApps, but TS RemoteApps do not just happen automatically. To enable them, you must add the installed applications to the allow list, and then package them for distribution. To do that, you’ll use the TS RemoteApp Manager.