Simplify IT management

We have time and again heard from customers that license management should focus on simplification to scale deployments. Over the past few years, we have focused on improving management of Remote Desktop (RD) Licensing servers and entitlement through Active Directory (AD).

Now, you will be able to leverage high availability RD Licensing servers with forward-compatibility for future versions of Windows Server to enable easier management of licenses from a variety of RDS releases.
We have also made it easier to manage licenses for your employees by bringing the ability for the RD Licensing servers to update RDS user Client Access Licenses (CALs) into AD objects without accessing AD directly.
Lastly, we added perfmon (Performance Counters) APIs to provide partners an easy way to access data to build monitoring dashboards and deliver a consistent user experience.

User experience

We have also invested in providing an enhanced user experience where end users will be able to leverage desktops and apps through RDS 2019 to maximize productivity.

To start, we have added modern notifications for RemoteApp in the Action Center to improve productivity with applications like Microsoft Outlook.

We have improved upon innovations in Discrete Device Assignment in RDS 2016 to bring better security, virtual machine (VM) isolation, and performance for your graphic-intensive workloads. These improvements in GPU virtualization technologies will result in reduced network traffic and smooth video playback.

In addition to the GPU virtualization technology, we added high-level redirection of built-in or attached video cameras to deliver optimized video stream at higher frame rates in new and legacy remote applications and desktops. Users can now have a better experience with video-intensive interactions.

Lastly, we have reduced CPU usage on the client and server and bandwidth with better image quality to bring a faster end-to-end web client experience.

Security

One of our primary goals as the Remote Desktop Services product team is to help improve your security posture for your desktop and app virtualization environments. We have improved security through several enhancements.

With Windows Admin Center integration, it is easy to consolidate all local and remote server management into a single pane.

We have brought several Windows Defender optimizations for multi-session to give you more confidence in bringing a secure, scalable and cost-effective desktop experience to end users.

We also added web client support for Single Sign-on (SSO) to deliver a streamlined authentication experience for users connecting via the web client.

A few additional features include easy-to-configure DTLS-based encryption, all of which, work toward providing a trusted end-to-end RDS deployment.