Windows Server 2008: How to use remote applications

In my company network we have a few applications that a lot of employees uses one a regular basis which gets updated by the users. For instance we use mRemote on a Terminal Service server to store various remote desktop connections to our internal servers as well as customer servers.

Because the connection list gets updated by a lot of different users, it is neccesary for people to login to the server and use the same application.

So I turned to the option of Remote Applications which came with Windows Server 2008, so my users wouldn’t have to remote desktop to the server with the mRemote application. Here is how to set it up with web interface access:

First of all we need to install the proper roles and features. Install the role Terminal Service, and since I wanted my co-workers to be able to access the application through a web interface, I also installed the feature TS Web Access.

Please note, that in order to be able to connect to the applications remotely the users has to be members of the domain.

Open the TS RemoteApp Manager from Start>Administrative Tools>Terminal Services. Here you can define which application that will be accessible through the terminal service

Add a RemoteApp program by selecting the programs in the wizard. Press next to finish the wizard.

Default settings will probably be sufficient, but else you will need to adjust settings according to your hosting environmet.

You should now be able to reach your applications by logging in to http://servername/TS. Though you can use an IP-adress instead of servername, the remote applications listed will use servername. I haven’t looked into how to change that, but if your server is not immediate available through servername, then add servername and IP to your hosts file.

When I finally call the URL, I received an ActiveX control error stating I haven’t Active X control installed or enabled:

ActiveX control not install or not enabled

The Terminal Services ActiveX Client control is not available. Before you can access remote programs and connect to remote desktops through TS Web Access, you must install and enable this ActiveX control.

So I added the URL to my trusted sites list, but that didn’t make any difference. I made sure I had SP3 installed on my Windows XP machine and updated it as well, but little did that do. Finally I came across a post on the Microsoft Technet forums, which suggested two things:

To enable the TS ActiveX control addon in Internet Explorer (Tools>Manage Addons), however I didn’t seem to have that option. the solution was to remove two certain registry keys:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings\{7390f3d8-0439-4c05-91e3-cf5cb290c3d0}

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings\{4eb89ff4-7f78-4a0f-8b8d-2bf02e94e4b2}

After I removed those keys I had no more problems using the Terminal Server Web Access. The reason this fix did the trick is because the TS ActiveX Control is disabled by default in Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and removing these two keys enables it.

So finally it worked: