There were many advances in remote desktop in Server 2012, including valiant attempts to make installation simpler. The optimised used of bandwidth is an excellent behind the scenes advantage that you can see working when bandwidth is limited. Very impressive.
However, the initial move to management via Server Manager and PowerShell brought a major casualty - the remote control feature had been removed. When I first could not see the feature I assumed I was doing something wrong! But it dawned on me that it had been removed. A quick search showed that others had the same problem. A few weak workarounds were suggested but this feature is one of the most important features of all out of the feature set! I have lost count of the number of times I have helped out someone by logging in and attaching to their session.
Here is the reason from MS:
Due to the removal of the classic shell and the new architecture of the desktop window manager, in addition, consider to the security, we have removed the Remote Control(Shadow Session) in Windows Server 2012.
This was a deal breaker and Server 2008 R2 is currently in use as I could not use 2012 without this feature. I wondered if it had been removed for good and would be left ultimately looking at higher end solutions with richer feature sets. When 2012 R2 came out recently one of the first things I checked for was remote desktop enhancements and the feature was back under the guise of Session Shadowing. For me this means that Server 2012 R2 will probably be replacing 2008 R2 for terminal services when it is released.
New features in Server 2012 R2:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn283323.aspx
On a related but separate note I think that the move to GUIs based on PowerShell has not been entirely successful, the new GUIs are pretty clunky, and you can almost feel them running the PowerShell commands under the covers. You can see they really hate doing anything other than manual refreshes where they rerun the PowerShell command to get a dataset back. Incremental search never features in any PowerShell backed GUI I have seen recently due to the same limitation. I am hoping they will improve on this in the next version or two.
