Hello community,

Since this is my first blog on this site so I thought it would be nice to introduce myself. My name is Brian McCann and I'm an Automation Engineer at Intel that focuses on platforms support. In short this means I'm in the trenches everyday supporting Intel's manufacturing environment. This blog is going to be focused on sharing my tools and best practices when managing a server environment, it is not going to be a sales and marketing blog...sorry to disappoint. My interests are hardware and software...in fact I'm a little biased toward Microsoft since I've supported Microsoft environments for some time now. If you want to find out a little more about me feel free to visit my other blog where I focus most of those blogs on Active Directory. Hopefully you'll like what you see here and come back for more.

Today I wanted to share with you a tool that will help simplify the management of your servers...especially if you have a lot of servers to manage like I do. Its name is VisionApp Remote Desktop and it is a great freeware program to manage Windows servers. I've always disliked the built-in MMC snap-in Remote Desktops. It is a very simple tool that is only good for managing about ten servers. Like you, I manage way more than ten servers. This tool has the following benefits to help you manage those remote desktop sessions:

• Sort Servers Alphabetically (This made me so angry that I couldn't do this with Microsoft's Remote Desktop MMC. When you have to manage a lot of servers it is a pain when you add new ones that follow a naming convention that now fall out of order)

• Create folders to help sort different types of servers (I created folders for my Production, Integration, Development and Virtual servers. This has made it extremely easy to find what I'm looking for.)

• Tabbed Remote Desktops (Tabs are huge right now and this tool takes full advantage of them. I can now open several different types of servers from different folders and access them via the tabs on the top.)

Hopefully this tool relieves some of the stress you have when managing your environment. I have plenty of tools and best practices stored up so let me know what you think about them. Also if you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.