ManageEngine Remote Access Plus vs. Remote Desktop Services

Remote Access Plus works well within the LAN, but it's a bit slower outside of it. Its ease of connection is a plus. It is not very suitable for connection through the APP, and consumes too much RAM during the connection, sometimes even causing the endpoint to freeze.You can access the CMD and perform tests without disturbing the user, or review the underlying services.

Incentivized

This is well-suited if you need to log in to a remote machine on occasion to make updates or change configurations. It is also good for a production environment or for environments where people need to log in to use common applications, so you don't need to install the application on each individual client.

Incentivized

• It is embedded with great features like voice support, video assistance, and even text support, which provides a great user experience.
• It provides features like remotely shut down the end system, renaming the endpoints, full list of applications running, process use, memory consumption, disk usage which are very beneficial.
• We can even uninstall unwanted applications, delete malicious files, kill heavily used process, modify registry values.
• It helps in to keep track of windows event that occurs in the system, it also provides report in desired format.

Incentivized

• When you connect with RDS, everything looks and feels (and is) exactly like you're sitting at that desktop. This is great for us and for users.
• You can sign in with RDS and the desktop will be the same as when you left it (if you choose to set it up that way).
• Although they take some setup, RemoteApps are a very handy way to let users access a program without requiring them to actually connect to a remote desktop on the server.

Incentivized

• The mobile app is not very functional and causes a lot of problems.
• The bandwidth it consumes on each connection is a lot.
• It consumes too much RAM during connection.
• The keyboard, and basic functions like pasting or transferring files are more complicated.

Incentivized

• Remote Desktop Services currently does not support multiple monitors on the terminal server. Unlike other applications such as Teamviewer, there's no feature to toggle between multiple screens even if they were connected to the terminal server.
• Remote Desktop Services should provide an option to scale up or down the screen size after a connection is established. Currently you can only adjust the screen size prior to a connection is established. So you'll have to take a best guess at what display screen resolution will fit best on your screen.
• Remote Desktop Services should offer some kind of menu to send special key strokes like Ctrl+Alt+Del to the terminal server. Currently the substitute for that particular combination is Ctrl+Alt+End. But I have yet to discover a replacement for other combination keystrokes such as Alt+PrintScrn.

Incentivized

My rating is due to the fact that there are still many things to improve, and things that could be opened up a little more to allow the administrator to have greater control, such as being able to have one more endpoint in a custom group, which is essential and cannot be done.

Incentivized

The initial setup for Remote Desktop Services is complex, and licensing is costly. Each user connects to their virtual desktop hosted by a single server or group of servers, so a change or issue with servers quickly impacts every single user at the same time. Aside from that, users appreciate seeing their same personal desktop from any device or geographical location.

Incentivized

There are some third party tools available that allow you to manage multiple connections.

Incentivized

As with any Microsoft Server product, support for Remote Desktop Services requires a paid support package. These are license-based and very costly, on top of the already costly product licensing. Microsoft's licensing is complicated to begin with, so setting up licensing alone essentially requires a licensing expert's counsel. There is community documentation and support available on Microsoft websites, as well as community websites.

Incentivized

Remote Access Plus is a lot more user friendly and can easily be used by junior IT staff efficiently.

It is also a lot more powerful with a range of additional features and functions

Incentivized

We selected Remote Desktop Services based upon price alone. Other solutions on the market are significantly more expensive, but if your company can foot the bill you should seriously consider products that have been on the market for longer. The lack of an ability to easily upgrade farm servers has been a challenge for us - although it is still faster than updating an application on 2000+ machines. The lack of a centralized management console in 2008 R2 is also challenging, but you get by with the tools available to you. If you don't have the money to spend on Citrix or VMWare Horizon, Remote Desktop Services is a decent replacement.

Incentivized

• Faster recovery of issues from screen sharing
• managing patches without manual intervention
• deploying software to multiple workstations at the same time

Incentivized

• Allowed remote users access from home
• Shared file access for multipolar users from a centralized location
• Cost to add additional users when maxed out
• Purchase multiple licenses for programs to run in virtual machines. Or unable to run on a virtual machine

Incentivized