Windows MultiPoint Server

» see microsoft.com/windows/multipoint as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Multiseat computing is an old idea that keeps coming back whenever hardware is expensive relative to the number of people who need it. One machine, several screens with a keyboard under each of them, everybody getting their own session. Terminals did it in the 1970s because computers cost a building. Windows MultiPoint Server did it in 2010 because a school district in the wrong part of a budget cycle could not buy thirty PCs.

Microsoft released it in February 2010, built on Windows Server 2008 R2 and Remote Desktop Services underneath. The hardware requirements were deliberately boring. Any multi-monitor video card would do, hanging off any USB 2.0 hub, with whatever keyboards the school already owned. You plugged a station together out of parts and the server treated it as an independent desktop.

The licensing is what actually made it a product rather than a configuration. There were two versions. The academic one came through volume licensing, joined a domain, had no station limit beyond what the hardware could take, and required a Windows Server CAL plus a MultiPoint CAL for every seat. The OEM one capped you at ten stations, could not join a domain, and needed only the MultiPoint CAL. Microsoft had built a product whose main feature was a discount.

This was never sold to people, it was sold to procurement, which puts it outside anything I used. The room it was designed for is one I did sit in, though. Turkish school and university labs of that period ran on scarcity in exactly this shape, where the number of working machines and the number of students in the class were different numbers and everybody knew it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ three releases ~

MultiPoint Server 2011 came out on 10 March 2011, still on Server 2008 R2, and added the ability to reach stations over the LAN with ordinary RDP clients and RemoteFX thin clients rather than requiring everything to hang off USB from the one box. That change quietly turned it from a cable-management product into a small network product.

The 2012 release, on 27 November 2012, was the one that felt finished. It moved to Windows Server 2012 and added disk protection, which threw away changes at the end of a session in the manner of Windows SteadyState. It also shipped the MultiPoint Dashboard, letting a teacher watch and take over every screen in the room from the front. That last feature is the only part of the product that was designed for a human being rather than a spreadsheet.

~ the actual end ~

Windows MultiPoint Server 2012 was the last standalone release. With Windows Server 2016 the whole thing became MultiPoint Services, a role you install from Server Manager, which is the usual Microsoft way of retiring a SKU without saying so. Microsoft then stopped developing the role, pointed customers at Remote Desktop Session Host instead, and left MultiPoint Connector as a Features on Demand component. The role is not available on Server Core at all.

The dates on the standalone versions run out in order. Mainstream support for 2010 ended 14 July 2015 and extended support 14 July 2020. The 2011 release ran to 13 July 2021. The 2012 release, the good one, took its final monthly rollup on 10 October 2023 and that was the end of the line.

~ what killed it ~

The premise expired. MultiPoint existed because a Windows desktop cost more than a school could multiply by thirty, and by the middle of the 2010s that stopped being true. Chromebooks arrived at a price where one device per child was a purchase order rather than a fantasy, and the management story came with them instead of being bolted on.

There is a real loss buried in the boring corporate ending. A product whose entire reason for existing was that some rooms have more students than computers is a product with a specific view of who its customer was, and that view was correct for a while in a lot of places. It just stopped being the cheapest way to be correct.

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