Well look at that, another improvement that was built into working with RWW in SBS 2008. As I was going through finalizing some lab work today I ran into a nice surprise when connecting to a domain client through Remote Web Workplace (RWW). All y'all are probably familiar with the purpose and function of RWW (I'll be talking about RWW mods in other posts soon) so I can get right to the beef!

Say you want to access a computer on the domain and just connected over the Internet to your place e.g. https://remote.sbstraining.net and logged into RWW to be presented with this screen above. Naturally you will click the Connect to a Computer link to connect to a workstation. In the previous version of the SBS RWW (SBS2003), it would just connect you through, and in case someone else was working on the machine that you connect to, they would just be logged off without any warning, and you connecting in from the outside had no clue that you just kicked someone else of the workstation.

In the new and improved version of SBS, you get a warning on the sreen advising you that someone else is currently using the computer!

The logon message states: Another user is currently logged on to this computer, this user has to disconnect from this computer. Do you want to continue? Naturally you click yes to proceed, as your work is always more important than other peoples. You then get the screen below:

On the computer that you are trying to access, the current user gets this dialog box:

And that current user has the option to accept or deny your access request. Well in this case the current user decides that their work is more imporatant than yours, and clicks CANCEL! The end result is that you lose because the current user has the long end of the stick and you get this:

WAAAAH!  Well, just kidding, this is a big improvement for the end-user side of using RWW and remotely using a workstation as unsuspecting users will no longer be kicked of their workstation  without a warning.

But lets say, you do get logged into the workstation from remote, and then a local user want to log on to the workstation, then what? Well, first of all the logon screen will look like this

so first of all the local user now sees that someone else is also logged on from remote. Of course that doesnt matter, and the user decides to log in locally. In that case the local user gets this message

Look familiar? And the remote user gets this:

And on the remote machine you get this message

Since the remote person is a nice person, and the other person may be your boss or someone that signs your paycheck, you decide to click OK to accept being logged off, and get logged off and get a disconnect message

Pretty cool, eh?