Remote Desktop Services Session Terminator Application

FastTrack Automation Studio comes with the ability to build an application for your Help Desk to find all sessions in a Remote Desktop Services farm and log users out, without even having a domain administrator account.

This is probably a scenario that you will recognize as a very common problem with disconnected sessions. You only need to define, where to look in your Active Directory for servers and which domain admin account to use to execute the log out and your Help Desk can handle it without direct access to the servers.

RDS Session Terminator

The application

When the application (script compiled into an exe file) is executed, the Help Desk user simply sees a list of session in the server farm. They simply pick a logged on user to log out and that's it. While the user is on the phone, this is a quick operation that can be handle in seconds.

Remote Desktop Services Session Terminator application

Building from the Home Screen

When you start FastTrack Automation Studio, you start in the Home Screen. Click the "Help Desk" icon and select the sub-menu option to build the RDS Session Terminator Application.

Home Screen Help Desk App Generator

This will pop-up a wizard, where you configure, where to look for servers. You can either create a simple version to either ask for a server or hard-code a server list (and rebuild the app, when there is a change) or you can have the application look in an OU for servers, optionally only the ones with a certain prefix.

Help Desk application feature select

The above shows the page in the wizard, where you configure servers to browse for sessions. A page will also show up allowing you to enter credentials for a domain administrator account to switch to upon execution of the exe file.


Rating: 5 out of 5

"Use this as a replacement for VBScript and PowerShell"

"It's easy to include attractive GUI elements in FastTrack scripts, beyond the basic dialog boxes and text input that VBScript offers ... Another powerful feature is the ability to distribute scripts as Windows Installer (.msi) or standard .exe files. Although interesting in its own right, this ability results in a much more intriguing capability: to repackage -- or wrap -- software installers as .msi files without using snapshots. If you've ever created an .msi installer file from before-and-after system snapshots, for use with a software distribution system such as Group Policy or SCCM, then you know how hit-and-miss the results can be."

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Rating: 8 out of 10

"Faster than the rest"

"We found the FastTrack syntax to be more transparent and easier to learn than Microsoft's PowerShell – the editor in particular provided good support in this regard. the Script Editor offers a large number of options from the command set through to simple output of graphical elements, which cannot be achieved at all with PowerShell or other solutions or only with a significantly greater level of effort."

"Anyone wanting to tackle the many hurdles in everyday admin and especially anyone for whom logon scripts and client automation is a priority will benefit from the variety of functions offered by FastTrack."

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