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The list of tools we use every day can be a little daunting. Even in small environments, administration of all hardware and software requires the use of multiple tools. The MMC can only take you so far.
Remote Desktop Manager Standard helps solve the problem having to open one tool for every administrative action. With Remote Desktop Manager, you can have a single, easy to use tool.
Multiple connection support
The quickest way to get started is to use the QuickConnect feature at the top of the screen. This will get you started even without any knowledge of Remote Desktop Manager by providing quick access to Remote Desktop, VNC, and the Web Browser.
Beyond QuickConnect, you are initially presented with a small set of buttons to click that will get you started creating new groups and sessions.
Remote Desktop Manager - Default QuickConnect options
The real power of this product is the plethora of remote session types supported. Just a brief list includes Automatic VPN, Citrix, Microsoft Remote Desktop, Hyper-V, PCAnywhere, Powershell Putty, VMWare, and VNC. Each type falls into one of the categories of Remote Connections, or Virtualization. See the comparison feature grid for all supported technologies. The feature grid will also show some additional connection types for Enterprise Edition.
You can also create individual sessions for connections to web interfaces. I found this feature to be incredibly useful. Just a short list of web interfaces that many of us access on a regular basis include VoIP phone systems, routers, switches, firewalls, Office 365, and public DNS. I really like the ability to those all setup once and available by a single mouse click.
Remote Desktop Manager - Options
Ease of Use
I found this product to be fairly intuitive and easy to use but needed to reference the user manual available at the Devolution website. One thing to remember, right-clicking session tabs presents unique options including sending the CTRL+ALT+DEL key combination. Their website also has several tutorial videos to help you get started.
Remote Destkop Manager - CTRL ALT DEL key combination
Groups
The groups feature allows easy organization of the session types into logical groups. I found it incredibly useful to have the ability to group by building, campus, site, or customer. I think any administration that spends a lot of time accessing multiple groups of servers and devices would really like this feature.
Remote Desktop Manager - Groups
Related documents
There are a couple nice ways you can add shortcuts to documentation to the dashboard. The first way is to link individual Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), PDF, Text or Visio documents. When you haven’t worked at a particular location for a while, you can quickly call up a Visio drawing that shows you the network layout.
Another way to link to documents is through a Windows Explorer entry.
Either way, making sure you modify the Display setting to Embedded (tabbed). Embedding each interface will really make things seamless for you.
Conclusion
Remote Desktop Manager is a great product that I believe any system administrator would find very useful. I would definitely recommend checking it out.
Remote Desktop Manager
Note: Remote Desktop Manager has been submitted to the 4sysops free admin tool list in March 2011. This text is about the latest version 7.5.
Please note this is FREE (to download), of course it is. However its a 30 day TRIAL only and should be titled correctly.
The standard edition is free, for the enterprise edition you can download a 30 day trial.
Nice tool. Thank you. Still use Remote Desktop Connection Manager from Microsoft but this looks useful too.
There are so many things this program can do… it’s been 5 years since this article was posted… would love to see an update! I’m still amazed at the power this tool has.
Totally agree with Brian on this one, RDM is getting better and better. Lot of new features during the last 5 years.
Remote Desktop Manager is very easy to use and you may put lots of different types of credential on it. And really fast. We use in our company, as support multi user access, audit, record all in a database, safely.
How does it store all the high privileged passwords and keys used for all those endpoints?