One of our priorities for this year was to improve our remote access offering to staff to enable more flexible working whilst outside of college. Office 365 helps greatly and has already improved functionality in many ways but there’s still some legacy applications and classic file shares that need to be provided remotely too. If at all possible we prefer the files not to leave the network so some form of virtual desktop looked the way to go.

After discounting VMware and Citrix offerings on cost grounds the improvements to Microsoft’s RDS offering in Server 2016 seemed to come at a perfect time.

Even more so now we’ve implemented Azure AD Application Proxy (more on that shortly!) We’ve also recently decommissioned some services that freed up a bit of physical hardware resource to “play” with so away we went!

Server installation

The physical hardware for now is running on some…