Terminal Services Settings That Affect Remote Assistance

This article describes some Terminal Services settings that may affect the functionality of the Remote Assistance tool.

The following settings can affect Remote Assistance.

Under Sessions

• Set time limit for active sessions
• Set time limit for idle sessions
• Terminate session when time limits are reached

The maximum length of an active or idle session affects Remote Assistance because the server disconnect the session after that amount of time.

Under Terminal Services

• Limit number of connections

If this setting is set to 0 (zero), Remote Assistance does not work. Remote Assistance is counted as a connection; if this setting is set to a specific number of connections, and those connections are already in place, Remote Assistance does not work when you attempt to initiate a Remote Assistance session.

Permissions

Remote Assistance will work if either the Administrators or System group has at least User permissions, and the Help Assistant account has at least Guest permissions. In this case, the helper can take control, save files, and so on. This is the minimum level of permissions for Remote Assistance to work. Because Remote Assistance uses the Terminal Service account of Help Assistant, the permissions of the account have some effects on Remote Assistance. With the permissions listed above, even if you set the access permission of Remote Assistance to Guest, you can still save files and make changes through Remote Assistance. Because of this, system administrators cannot limit Remote Assistance access by setting permissions.

Settings That Have No Effect

The following Terminal Services settings do not have any effect on basic Remote Assistance functionality:

• Color Depth
• User session limit
• Logon User Name and Password