[This post comes to us courtesy of Maanavi Bisaria and Rituraj Choudhary from Global Business Support]
We will cover the following aspects of Remote Web Access (RWA) on Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials in this blog:
- Configuring Remote Web Access
- Customizing Remote Web Access
Configuring Remote Web Access
To configure RWA, open the HOME tab on the Windows Server Essentials Dashboard. On the Get Started page, click Set up Anywhere Access, and then click Click to configure Anywhere Access.
This will open Set up Anywhere Access wizard. On the first screen, if you don’t have a UPnP router, you should check the option Skip router setup. I want to set up my router manually as indicated below, and then click Next.
You would then see a Getting Started page. Click Next to proceed. On the following screen, check the box I want to set up a new domain name.
The wizard would search for the available domain name service providers on the next screen and presents you with these two options:
The first option Purchase professional domain name from a supported provider offers GoDaddy.com and eNomCentral as the supported domain name service providers. However, if you don’t intend to pay for the domain name services, choose the second option Get a personalized domain from Microsoft.
Once you hit Next on this screen, you need to sign in to your Microsoft account with your Live ID. Accept the Privacy Statement and Agreement, and then type a name for your domain (remotewebaccess.com is provided as a default domain name suffix). Click on the Check Availability button to check the availability of the domain name. Click on Set Up when you find a suitable domain name available for use.
Once your domain name has been set up, you may configure Remote Web Access. To do so, check the box Remote Web Access and click Next. You may also choose to enable VPN in this step, however, we will discuss VPN on a separate blog post.
This step in the background installs and configures Network Policy Server, Remote Desktop Gateway, Client Certificate Mapping Authentication, and RPC over HTTP Proxy. You may verify these roles/features in the Server Manager.
Once this is completed successfully, your Remote Web Access has been set up successfully and can be browsed at https:// .remotewebaccess.com.
Customizing Remote Web Access
Once the Anywhere Access Wizard has been completed, open the HOME tab on the Windows Server Essentials Dashboard. On the Get Started page, click Set up Anywhere Access, and then click Click to configure Anywhere Access. This will open the Settings page of Anywhere Access. Please note that once we have configured RWA, you can view the status of Anywhere Access at the top of this window, along with Configure and Repair options.
