Remote Web Work Place vs Terminal Services on SBS

It's incredibly foolish and unwise to give ANYONE who is not an IT person direct access to the server.  Infecting it with viruses, accidentally doing something stupid, staying logged in from an unsecure location and having someone else do something stupid are all risks, not to mention that running software that further complicates the SBS install will only increase the odds of failure - you want the server up, right?

RWW offers remote access to the local workstations where people have their own programs and potentially files stored.  

You COULD add a FULL Terminal Server (Remote Desktop Server), but that is DOUBLING your license costs if you already have the workstations in the office.  

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your question and if you elaborate on what you want to do and what you have I could offer better comments.

Tens of millions of people use use Terminal Servers for their remote work and among those there are many that access SBS servers. There are endless sources of documentation on how to set it up so that it is secure.  None of those methods involves giving the average user the right to do any of the things described in your posts - the whole idea is tight control so people can only do what they need to do - they don't become administrators just  because one uses Terminal Services. If either of you have set up a Terminal Server I'm sure the above is not news to you.

As far as what I was looking for I wanted to know what features would Remote Workplace offer that properly configured Terminal Service access would not offer? I am not concerned with cost  - I am concerned with features. I don't off-hand see anything i can provide the user with Remote Workplace that I can't give them with Terminal Server access.

RobWill:

Your last response was exactly what I was looking for. A couple of final question:

With TS it's pretty hard for authorized users (or anybody) to simply copy a file/folder from the TS to a local computer.  What about RWW?  

TS allows all kinds of very specific desktop lockdown with GPO, etc. and also allows for deployments using GPO - how does RWW measure up in those categories?

Robwill:

Thanks for the further clarification.

Actually I want to make it hard to copy files - does one do a better job than the other when it comes to that? Ditto for Sharepoint means of accessing LAN data and Shared Files.  

As far as GPO and lockdown, I don't really want to run around and create policies on individual PC's if that's what your comments mean. Perhaps I misunderstood RWW - is it a way to log in to a your 'thick computer' at work remotely as opposed to RDP which logs you into your 'thin' desktop session on  a single Terminal Server on which other sessions by other users are operating simultaneously? So 10 users using RWW are logged into 10 different computers as opposed to 10 users using TS being logged onto one single computer - the Terminal Server?

Thanks for the further clarification. There in in fact is a Web-based RDP client. And you can create an RDP environment without TS whereby people login to their computer at the office via RDP and then access the server 'thick' style from there (or even thin style from the PC they've logged in on but that would beg the question why they don't just TS into the server itself.)  However my question is about users logging into a single Terminal Server from remote locations via standard or Web RDP clients versus RWW. In the scenario I am referring to  ether you are using the standard client or the Web client, you grab a session on the TS, you don't grab a PC. Is that the case with RWW? Or is with RWW that you grab a PC on the network and from there access network resources 'thick' and multiple people can grab multiple PC's simultaneously so many people can be logged in using RWW simultaneously just as with RDP/TS the difference being RWW grabs  PC's on the network through a Web interface whereas RDP/TS logins in my scenario grab  TS sessions, not PC's? Or does/can RWW grab simultaneous sessions on  a single server as well/in addition to grabbing individual PC's?

Thanks for the lengthy feedback.  What it sounds like you are telling me is that on the SBS Server I create the RWW portal.  Through that portal I can let users see Terminal Servers, File Servers, individual workstations, network services e.g. Sharepoint.  If that's correct then I see no feature value in it over Terminal Services.  With TS a user runs the RDP client from a 'thin' workstation and gets e-mail, file services, Sharepoint, etc. - everything they want running on the one TS.  If I had an RWW portal, the user might have Web mail and  Sharepoint directly on the  portal but if they wanted to run a central accounting app they would have to use the portal to find either a TS server that it was installed on or a workstation that had a network client installed for the accounting program. Security and cost apart, it seems from a feature point of view TS offers everything that RWW offers in a one-step login whereas with RWW there is a multiple-step login - login to the portal and have access to, as you mention Sharepoint and Webmail, but then a second login is required to either a PC or a TS to run other applications e.g. the accounting app I described.

Thanks again but I understand the differences.  It's what those differences mean very specifically is what I am trying to nail down.

You write:
"The advantage is RWW works without a TS."
Yes, I understand that but it doesn't do the same thing as TS is what I am getting from your description. Can I run a centralized multi-user accounting application via RWW without TS and without access to local computers,  would the application show up on the RWW portal page like Web mail or Sharepoint, can I make it show up there? With TS I can but it sounds like with pure RWW without TS I can't.

Great. We are on the same wavelength.  Thanks for all the tutoring. (I guess of diminished value now that SBS seems to be going away.)

RWW/RWA is not going away though, just Exchange and Sharepoint.