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Dean Suzuki Blog

Title: Building a Remote App Server

Created: 11/26/2012

Description:

With Surface RT releasing, some of my customers were asking if they could get Outlook on the Surface

RT device. The solution is publishing Outlook as a remote application that is accessible via a web

browser. In this post, I will walk through the steps of setting up a Remote App server using Windows

Server 2012.

References:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/supportingwindows/archive/2012/11/02/windows-8-windows-server-2012-

session-based-desktop-deployment.aspx (Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012: Session based Desktop

Deployment)

Disclaimer:

Contents of this blog and article represent the opinions of Dean Suzuki, and do not reflect the views of my employer. (C) 2012 Dean Suzuki, All Rights Reserved

Procedure:

Table of Contents 1 Create Remote App Server VM: ............................................................................................................ 1

2 Install Remote Desktop Services ........................................................................................................... 2

3 Adding Outlook As A RemoteApp ......................................................................................................... 5

4 Accessing The Remote App ................................................................................................................... 8

5 Creating A New Collection .................................................................................................................. 11

1 Create Remote App Server VM:

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The remote app server will run on Windows 2012.

Create a new virtual machine for the remote app server.

See the earlier posts for building a base Windows 2012 VM.

Set the IP address of the server

Change the name of the server

Join the server to the domain.

2 Install Remote Desktop Services Launch Server Manager

Select Add Roles and Features

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Select “Remote Desktop Services Installation”

Select “Quick Start”

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Select “Session-based desktop deployment”

Select the server that we are building to host the RD services.

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Check restart and press Deploy

Server reboots

3 Adding Outlook As A RemoteApp Install Outlook 2003 onto the RDS server. I discovered that you need a volume license version of Outlook to install on the server.

In Server Manager, click “Remote Desktop Services” (bottom option on left menu bar).

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Click on QuickSessionCollections

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In the RemoteApp Programs section, go to the “Tasks” dropdown menu and select “Publish RemoteApp Programs”

Select “Outlook 2013”

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Click Publish

4 Accessing The Remote App

Launch a browser

Enter the URL of the remoteapp server /rdweb

E.g. “https://remoteapp.irvlab.mtcdemos.net/rdweb”

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I didn’t install a real certificate yet. So, select “Continue to this website”

Login with a valid user id.

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Our Outlook App is now published!

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5 Creating A New Collection In the earlier sections, we added Outlook to the existing Quick Collection. In this section, I walk through how to create a new collection for Outlook.

Go into Server Manager and select the “Remote Desktop Services” tool (bottom icon on left toolbar).

Select “Create Session Collection”

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Named it “Remote Outlook” since we are publishing Outlook

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Oops. Didn’t take more screenshots. See the link in the Reference section for steps on creating a

new collection.