Terminal Service Plus

My business section have downloaded and tested the demo of TSPlus for basic application access and are impressed with the program as far as we have been able to test it for our purposes. They want to ask a few questions before proceeding to purchase.

1. On the features page on your website you mention "Load Balancing" and "Gateway Portal". Do you have any documentation which explains what these are and their benefits?

2. In your terms of use, you refer to remote assistance technologies and sharing a session with others. Does TSPlus have a remote 'screen sharing' assistant built into it (where an administrator can login and see/help a user) and can you supply some documentation on this?

3. In Terms of Use you say "You may use the Software's Remote Desktop feature to access the Host Device from any Device provided you acquire a separate Software license for that Device." This seems to suggest we would need a license for every remote device wanting to connect to the server, but given there is a portable client generator and html5 access, I am not sure i have understood it correctly. Can you please clarify?

4. When we do purchase and if we need support, I note you state response time 8 business hours. Is this strictly US EST office hours? Because we are in NZ, time zone differences could mean response times might exceed 24 hours which would not be acceptable downtime for customers dependent on the program during NZ working office hours, We have a number of suppliers in the US and urgent queries are handled by phone by our staff on special recall during our night hours. If needed for critical or urgent incidents involving TSPlus downtime through program failure, do you have a direct phone number for support? Skype or other?

5. We have a server hardware upgrade scheduled for the near future. How will this impact on an existing TSPlus installation?

Hello,

I will try to answer all of your questions below :

1. You will more information about loadbalancing here : http://tsplus.net/support/kb/faq.php?id=12
And also in the administrator guide page 14 available here : http://tsplus.net/TSplusUserGuide.pdf

2. Regarding remote control sharing, I also created a FAQ about this here : http://tsplus.net/support/kb/faq.php?id=33
And I also made a tutorial video about user management here : http://youtu.be/IMOLIaXuPbw

3. A TSplus license allows you to remotely connect with as many users as you wish. It is not a license per devices or per users like terminal server, it is a license for X concurrent session. This means you will be able to remotely access your TSplus server with as many local and/or domain users as what you purchased. Now what the terms of use reminds is that you need to make sure to have the right licenses for any software that you wish to publish within TSplus for your users.

4. Yes support can take more than 24h and we cannot be joined by phone. Usually 24hours is the longest time you will have to wait for an answer.

5. A server hardware upgrade can invalidate your TSplus license, if so open a support ticket here http://tsplus.net/support/ and provide us with your serial number.

Hello,

About the delay to answer to our cusromer support questions, I would like to add one comment:

Usually, we have some one available to answer to any incoming question and the average "react" time to answer is less than one hour.
I would say that 95% of our received messages are processed within 4 hours.
For the 5% which are longuer, it is often just because the question is complex, or, because we are not available at this specific moment.

Kind regards

John Davies

That is unless your problem occurs over the weekend and you are in a different time zone, then you have to wait until Europe wakes up on Monday before you get a response. One of our TSPlus servers changed itself from a 10 user license back to a trial license for no apparent reason on Saturday morning GMT+8, we are now at 16:52 GMT+8 on Monday, and despite raising two tickets, and sending emails to every email address we can find on the website, no one has got back to us.

I am extremely disappointed with the level of support, there is not a single phone number I can find we can call for urgent requests. Email and tickets take several days to reply to. We currently have TSPlus installed on 5 servers, there will not be a 6th. We look after the IT systems for a number of hotels, and one of those hotels has been unable to use the POS system in any restaurant, bar, shop or spa for almost three days as we are unable to get any answers from support. We will be looking seriously at replacing the software on all these servers.

If you want to put your product promoted as Microsoft TS done better, then you need to include support coverage in that. We reply on this product for line of business applications, we require 7 day per week cover, and if not 24 hours, certainly extended working hours 7 days a week.

Hi

If you need to get your license re-installed. You can try what I did over the weekend if you can access the server drive as a remote share using UNC names. If so you can rename the logonsession.exe to something else. Then when you try to login into the server you will get an error message. Do not close the error dialog intead launch TaskMgr using control-shift-escape and then start a new task and launch "Explorer.exe" from there you can either uninstall TSPlus so you can access the server using MS Remote Desktop or you can use the Admin tool to active your license file.

Simon

This issue with TSplus licenses reverting to trial is now fixed with version 8.40. I do not recommend renaming logonsession.exe as it can lead to other issues.

Does remote control sharing work in Windows Server 2012? Or is 2012 R2 required?

Art Lieberman

Hello,

Session shadowing is available by opening a command prompt and using the following :

mstsc /v:{server} /shadow:{sessionID} /control /noConsentPrompt

The /shadow parameter is not available in Server 2012. It was added in 2012 R2.
So, I guess that means TSPlus does not offer remote control of a user's screen on Server 2012.