Royal TS
As a sysadmin, I learned that I need good tools to be efficient; that’s why I love PowerShell!
First I used the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack; waouh! It’s great to be able to have an mmc that groups together all me connections and yeah that was in the early 2000s!
Ok, it was nice, for the time, free and provided by Microsoft, which is uncommon enough to point it out. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that a lot of features are missing. The first: we do not live in a perfect world, so I need to connect via SSH to linux servers! 😉
Here came mRemote. This tool allows to combine VNC, Terminal Server, SSH connections, among others, in a single console. We can say some kind of remote connections aggregator. But, this old great tool has been discontinued… That was the bad news, but the good news is : there’s even better than mRemote, it’s Royal TS!
Royal TS is offering a unique, powerful and very flexible solution for managing Remote Desktop (RDP), Terminal (SSH, Telnet, etc), VNC and many more connections on Windows and OS X. You can share your configuration in a team without sharing your passwords and no database backend is needed.
I will let you check the features by yourself and you can even compare with Remote Desktop Manager, that is a decent multi-protocol remote connection too:
Here’s a (non-exhaustive!) list of my favorite Royal TS key features:
- Connection list with bulk-edit functionality
- Organize connections in groups using folders and configure settings (credentials, connect task, etc.) inheritance from parent group for the connections.
- Key sequence tasks to send keyboard input to remote sessions and automate repetitive tasks against multiple sessions at once
- Ability to share connections, tasks and credentials
- Secure: Royal TS allows you to manage your credentials in a safe and secure manner with 256 bit AES encryption
- Connection templates to create new connections based on other connections
- Cross platform: Royal TS (for Windows) documents are fully compatible with Royal TSX (for OS X), Royal TSi (for iOS) and Royal TSD (for Android)
- TS Gateway support
- Ability to record and save a (terminal) session to file
- And so much more…
Ok, I’ve teased you, so now: what does it look like?
More screenshots
If, like me, you were using mRemote before and don’t want to recreate all your connections in Royal Ts, there’s a solution: http://www.royalts.com/main/Home/Win/Support/Blog/tabid/179/EntryId/165/How-to-open-or-import-mRemote-files.aspx
A free tip: you can create ‘.rts’ file from CSV; this PowerShell script allows you to create all your RDP connections from a comma-separated value file
Enough! Let’s me see what it is…