Microsoft Sysinternals breathes new life into Remote Desktop Connection Manager

Microsoft Sysinternals has revived remote desktop tool RDCMan as part of the Sysinternals Suite. Within Sysinternals, RDCMan v2.8 has been released for connecting to Windows computers remotely via the Remote Desktop Protocol.

RDCMan has been around since the early 2000s and until 2010 it was widely used by system administrators to remotely manage computers on their network. The app was updated to version 2.7 in 2014. In March last year, Remote Desktop Connection Manager, or RCDMan, was discontinued by Microsoft after a critical security flaw was discovered in the program.

From then on, Microsoft is calling for a move to Remote Desktop Connection or a universal remote desktop client, because these tools would be more secure and Microsoft RCDMan had not been updated since 2014 and because Microsoft would focus on virtualization and remote desktop tools such as Azure Virtual Desktop and RDS in Microsoft Azure.

Now RDCMan is back with version 2.8. The new version is mainly aimed at managing multiple remote desktop connections in server labs. The tool works much the same as the previous versions, but has improved password encryption via CryptProtectData or an X509 certificate and gains support for different types of user groups, including smart groups, which are dynamically composed based on a number of rules, and virtual groups .

Within Microsoft’s Sysinternals Suite, six tools will be updated. In addition to RDCMan v2.8, AccessChck v6.14 gets support for NULL DACL reports, Process Monitor is slightly improved to include support for key combinations Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C, Strings v.2.54 improves handling of files that like long strings, and contains bug fixes for Sysmon v.13.22 and TCPView v4.13.