Welcome to Day Number Twenty-Six. Tomorrow is Launch Day! Over the last twenty-five days we've gone over several different aspects of Windows Server 2008. Just because today is the last day in our Launch Series doesn't mean that we're going to ignore Windows Server 2008 for a while. Count on seeing more Windows Server 2008 posts in the future - just perhaps not quite so many in such a short space of time! Anyway, getting on with the business of the day, we're wrapping up our Launch Series with an Overview of Terminal Services Gateway (TS Gateway or TSG). So without further ado ...

First, what exactly is TS Gateway? It is a role service that enables authorized remote users to connect to resources on an internal corporate or private network from Internet-connected devices. The network resources can be either Terminal Servers running RemoteApp programs or systems with Remote Desktop enabled. If you think about Terminal Services Gateway as Terminal Services Proxy (which was the original name for this feature) or a VPN for Terminal Services, it may help with understanding exactly what it does. TS Gateway uses RDP over HTTPS to help form a secure, encrypted connection between remote users on the Internet and the internal network resources to which they need to connect. Sounds like a VPN without the actual VPN doesn't it?