In an era of tightening school budgets, the math was undeniable. Instead of buying twenty mid-range computers for a lab, a school could buy one high-end server and twenty cheap monitors and zero clients.
| Feature | WMS 2012 (Legacy) | MultiPoint Services (Server 2019) | Windows 365 Cloud PC | Linux Terminal Server (LTSP) | |--------|-------------------|-----------------------------------|----------------------|------------------------------| | | ~20 (USB video) | ~50 (via RDP/Thin clients) | 1 per license | Unlimited (hardware permitting) | | Hardware cost | Very low (one server) | Low (server + thin clients) | Zero (cloud-only) | Very low | | Software licensing | Included with Server 2012 | Included with Server 2019/2022 | Per-user/month | Free (open source) | | Support end date | 2023 | 2029+ | Ongoing | Community | | Graphics performance | Poor (USB 2.0 video) | Good (RemoteFX & GPU acceleration) | Excellent (Azure GPU VMs) | Variable | | Remote access | VPN required | Native RDP gateway | Any internet browser | SSH/VPN | windows multipoint server 2012 2021
Premium versions allowed the creation of "stations" from virtual machines, which helped run older software that wasn't originally designed for multi-user environments. In an era of tightening school budgets, the
The most critical shift for MultiPoint technology happened with the release of . The most critical shift for MultiPoint technology happened
By 2021, the landscape for MultiPoint had shifted from a standalone product to an integrated server feature: