Feature sugestion, make TsPlus the 2x/Citrix killer

[ictk]

Hi,
In the past I have managed several TSplus installations at multiple small companies.
However my biggest customer used to use Citrix and then switched to another package now owned by Parallels.
To be honest using 2X applicationserver was intuitive and I could install it under 15 minutes on any terminal server, which could not be said of Citrix Metaframe.

Sometime ago, this customer ask me to update their servers to Windows 2016 (2x 60 users), upon seeing the new license fees for their current RDP package, the customer asked me for an alternative and I suggested TsPlus.

I installed a demo on their new server, but being accustomed to 2X they found it less user friendly and are considering staying with 2X despite the steep price.

One of difference the customer noticed immediately was a missing shortcuts on their desktop.
This is a feauture with both 2X and Citrix have.
Because of this, most of the customer's staff even think they are working locally!

I have some features suggestions I would like to have with TsPlus to make TsPlus more likeable to the customer.
In my humble opinion, the user should (almost) not be aware he or she is working on a remote server.
To establish this I have some feature requests on top of the TSX app.

First add a secondary / backup host list, to connect to.
If the primary host is not available, then connect to the secondary, thertiary.... etc host.
The customer has the same host connected to 2 highspeed internet connections, so if 1 goes down, it would be
great if the app would (re)connect via the other connection.
(Or if you just have multiple host, the client could connect to the backup one automatically when needed)

Also a separate field for the host port, would be nice.
The default port is 80/443 but I like to change that.
It makes it less easier to hackers to hack your server, if they don't now your access port.
I know adding :portnumber behind the host or IP is possible, but a separate field is a cleaner solution.

Third I would like to be able to make shortcut from the published apps I see in the TSX App.
Preferabaly with the the App's own icon. This icon could be extracted from the app, and put in the user's profile.
The internal working could use the .connect protocol.
(BTW, the competitor mentionted earlier uses a shortcut to a file TSClient.exe on the client with parameters in which the password is encrypted.)

Furthermore the App starts within the TSX App window. To have a clean user experience I would suggest Apps starting from the
using the TSX App, to start as independed app (like .connect), but showing their own icon in the taskbar.

Last to make an 2018 impression I would like any (RDP) message when connecting to the host to be gone or atleast
smaller e.g. a small windows with the text: "NNNNN app connecingt to server XXXXXXXXX".
Also the big windows saying "signing off" is not so cool

Please let me know what you think of my idea's?
If something is not clear, tell me and I shall explain it more in depth.

Best regards,

Joshua.

[admin]

Hello,

Thank you very much for these points that I will share for sure with our development team.

About 2x, for you information, they did propose us to buy their source code several years ago. We did audit it and we decided not to invest in that direction because the code was written in C++ and too complex to maintain. Parallels did buy it and has fired all its development and support team. My feeling is simple, today it is a mistake to buy 2x because of Parallels is not going to enhance this product in the future.

For your first question, this feature already exist and is called RemoteApp on client. It does not create shortcuts on the desktop, however it does create the shortcuts in the user start menu and systray. More information about this feature can be found here : https://docs.dl-files.com/tsplus/remoteapp-on-client

For your second question, what you are looking for is a high availability system, and this kind of architecture is usually provided by vmware or similar fail over solution provider. With TSplus, you can create a farm of load balanced servers, if one server is down, the incoming connection are automatically redirected onto the next available server.

Your third question is about changing default port, which is definitively possible using the admin tool.
How to change default TSplus RDP port : https://docs.dl-files.com/tsplus/securi ... lus-server
How to change default TSplus web services : https://docs.dl-files.com/tsplus/built-in-web-server

Your fourth question is about application icons. For the time being, you can easily create a shortcut of your .connect connection client and edit the icon to match your user preference. I feel that we already have the proper documentation for this purpose : https://docs.dl-files.com/tsplus/client-icon

For your last question, we did study this but it appears to be not possible because of all the different cases.