Are you missing good old terminal services manager (remote desktop services manager) from the Windows Server 2008 R2? For reason that is unknown to me as of today the Microsoft has decided to remove this mmc snapin that was a quick management tool, if you needed to kill the process on the specific server or check the users currently logged on the servers. As of today the Microsoft has not provided any official replacement for this handy tool.
That is pity because I have used the tool numerous times.
So I started researching if I can and to me seems that the tool from Windows 2008 R2 works on the Windows 2012, 2012 R2, 2016 and Windows 10 as well! :-) So everything you need to do is to copy file from here: tsadmin and do following steps:
- The zip consist 4 files, tsadmin.msc, wts.dll, tsadmin.dll and tsadmin.reg that I have created for this experiment to work.
- extract the files to c:\Windows\System32\
- Double click on the tsadmin.reg to add to the registry required information for the terminal services manager in order to load the MMC snapin
- Double click on the tsadmin.exe
- voila it works!
- The best is if you add more servers under mygroup, when you run it again it will just work and read the servers you have added before
So what you can do? I have tested to work with:
- Windows server remote desktop services 2012
- Windows server remote desktop services 2012 R2
- Windows server remote desktop services 2016
- Windows server remote desktop services 2019 build 17623 (at a time of the article the Windows 2019 RTM was not announced yet)
The functions working are:
- disconnecting a session
- sending message
- resetting session
- status of the session
- logging of the session
- ending a process on the processes tab (one of the simplest most important features of the tool)
Let me know in the comments is it working as it should for you as well?
BTW if you need powerful full blown management tools you can take a look at SysKit Monitor.
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I use LizrdSystems Terminal Services manager on Windows 2016. It work well. Free for personal use.
https://lizardsystems.com/terminal-services-manager/
Thanks, Frane. Works like a charm! Boy, have I been missing that app in Server 2012 & 2016.
This bit should be “tsadmin.msc”
#4. Double click on the tsadmin.exe
agree! thanks for the correction