Patent ID: 7590713

Claim:
A method for presenting a merged view of remotely installed applications to which a user has terminal server (TS) based access, the method comprising: sending, by a client computing device, a remote application discovery request to a Remote Application Publishing (RAP) web server; receiving, by the client computing device, responsive to the request, a discovery response from the RAP web server, the discovery response comprising remote application information aggregated by the RAP web server from multiple sources; and generating, by the client computing device, based on the discovery response, one or more shortcuts to one or more respective applications to which the user has TS based access, wherein the one or more shortcuts are independent application files that point to the one or more respective applications to which the user has TS based access, the shortcuts being stored on the client computing device and presented to the user through a user interface (UI) shell executing on the client computing device, wherein each of the applications to which the user has TS based access are installed at one or more installation points in an Intranet, the client computing device being external to the Intranet, wherein a RAP wizard is configured to allow the user to specify the application to be published, and wherein the one or more shortcuts present a merged view to the user of the applications to which the user has TS based access, the merged view being transparent of whether the applications to which the user has TS based access are managed by different information sources across multiple accessor modules on the Intranet and configured for remote TS-based execution by different ones of multiple installation points.