Remote Desktop Services from Microsoft is virtual desktop and remote user session technology.
N/A
Zoom Workplace
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Zoom Workplace, Zoom’s open collaboration platform with an AI Companion, empowers teams to be more productive, and strengthen customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle with Zoom’s Business Services for sales, marketing, and customer experience teams, including Zoom Contact Center.
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.
Zoom Workplace is ideal for any business looking for a communication/collaboration solution. This is more so for businesses with a hybrid workforce. It makes holding virtual meetings and collaboration sessions easy, and teams can participate seamlessly thanks to features such as Zoom Whiteboard, Zoom Teams chat, and Zoom Phone, among others. In a nutshell, Zoom Workplace makes teamwork and productivity easy.
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.
Audio quality of phone calls is spot on. Calls are clear and crisp.
Video quality of video meetings are clear and there aren't any pixelization artifacts that some systems can have.
Having AI summaries have been life changing for us. We no longer have to concentrate on note taking, like we did in the past. The summaries are accurate and enable us to put our efforts in the meeting or conversation. Plus, we can save them into our practice management system as required.
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.
I don't think there is any malfunction in their solution; it's extremely convenient to use, be it creating a meeting invite, adding people, sending any extra stuff to them. It's quick, and this is the only tool that works seamlessly even on Androids.
We're sticking with Zoom for the foreseeable future--given its compelling feature set, ease of use, and advanced technology, there's just no other competition to be excited about. Plus it's a Gartner-recognized industry leader, so it's a rather easy choice.
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.
Zoom is made for the non tech office. It has features that can be made to do what you need to run things on a day to day basis. Immediately we we able to get meetings going with remote employees. The ability to be able to add smartphone connected people was a big plus. Zoom met our needs at the time.
There have been less than a handful of outages during our two years with Zoom, and whenever there was one, an email informing us of the outage went out immediately, and they had the issue resolved shortly thereafter.
Zoom has among the best performance of any video conference platform, as I've mentioned several times. Besides that, their Chat platform works great, and their back end always runs smooth. It's unfortunate that reporting can now only be done by one month at a time, but nonetheless, it only takes a second to run any kind of Zoom report, whether it's an attendee report, Poll results, a user report, a list of meetings from the past month, etc.
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.
Because I got a response right away, and was assigned one specific individual to work with me from the beginning to the resolution. I had an actual email address and direct contact with this person without having to start over and over every time I contacted Zoom - this singular individual remained attentive and was well informed on the subject matter and quite able to resolve my needs.
If you receive any pushback from higher ups, point to any of the various positive reviews like this one. Or show Zoom's excellent Gartner report, or articles describing Zoom's partnership with Sequoia capital. It's not difficult to show how Zoom is a trustworthy industry leader with best-in-class technology.
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.
Teams do not stack up to Zoom at all. My clients use Teamas because it is a corporate policy, and they use it most of the time between employees of the same company. It makes sense for this, NOT for me. Every time a Teams meeting is launched, since I am not part of this company, the meeting is laborious, the interface is not as nice as Zoom's, sharing documents is more difficult, etc., etc. Zoom is superior to Teams in every way!!!
The billing and price model is really fair for so many functions that they offer, our remote work requires each of the features that Zoom offers, so accepting payment for a tool like this is the least we can do. I like that billing arrives on time and that they offer opportunities and payment times.
Because the Basic licenses are completely free, and because it's very easy to configure and install Zoom, and because anyone can join Zoom from a link without needing an account, scaling is a Breeze. There are absolutely no roadblocks. My company keeps adding more Zoom Pro license every week since it's so in demand. We were able to convert users from several different platforms onto Zoom with no trouble at all.
Zoom is perfect for our business. We use it to video chat with prospective clients. The name recognition alone gives us credibility and it is very easy to screen share and send content out.
