Can you force and RDP sessions Experience Level?

Remote Desktop has allowed network administrators to remotely manage servers for years. While studying Remote Desktop settings this past week, we were looking at the possible experience settings below.

From these settings, you can control how much visual data is set from the target server to your remote session on your computer. The question was is there a way to set the experience level on the target server and override what the user wants? Using group policy, you can. Take a look at the settings below that can be found at Computer Configuration \ Policies \ Administrative Templates \ Windows Components \ Remote Desktop Services \ Remote Desktop Session Host \ Remote Session Environment

To demo the target override, I set the GPO to Enforce Removal of Remote Desktop Wallpaper. Here is a very annoying desktop background that I put on my server while logged in locally.

Below is the same view while logged in using RDP.

My RDP settings were set to Allow Desktop, but the GPO enforced on the target was set to Enforce Removal of Remote Desktop Wallpaper.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Hi, I am actually looking into the other direction. All RDP clients have by default the background not shown. But I want to enforce the Background to display regardless of what the RDP client has set. I don't find a way to do this centrally. Is there any way?

October 29, 2013 at 1:29 PM

Jason Yoder, MCT said…

This is a good one. I just spent an hour with the 2012 GPO data and could not find an avenue for success. I'm working on finding a method using GPO Preferences to try and set a registry value to have this flag set by default. Still working on it.

October 29, 2013 at 3:14 PM

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