Computers and Internet access are universally available, but your corporate network resources are probably only available on your office PC and on your laptop. If you wanted to securely use your office resources from another computer — say, your husband’s laptop or your local library’s PC — you were out of luck. Until now.
By using the combination of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 services, your IT department can set up what Microsoft calls Secure Remote Connection. With this feature, a user on any Windows 7 system can gain access to the corporate intranet’s resources. In short, with the right back-end setup you can run office-only programs and get to server-based files from any Windows 7 PC. If desired, you could even set up a complete thin-client desktop solution, where the entire business desktop is hosted on the servers and staff run the desktop on any Windows 7 PC with a high-speed Internet connection.
What makes this different from, say, Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Gateway or Citrix XenApp? Secure Remote Connection tries to provide a more integrated package on the server side that also doesn’t require any additional software on the Windows 7 desktop.
Microsoft hasn’t yet provided a recipe on how to do this, but we do know what the ingredients are for this virtual desktop dish. On the server side, it starts with Server 2008 R2’s Remote Workspace and Remote Desktop Gateway.
