These users are typically project managers who need the power of Project Professional for scheduling, resource assignment, reporting, etc. These users can run Project Professional on their own PCs and connect directly to the hosted Project Server through https.

If users do not want to install Project Professional on their local PC, they can choose the Remote Desktop option and access everything through a browser. Project Professional users also have Project Web App (PWA) access to the Project Server.

Every environment must have at least one Administrator user. An Administrator can add new users at any time, and your billing will be adjusted accordingly. By default, an Administrator is a Project Server Admin that can set the appropriate Project Server permissions for any new user that is added.

This is a great option for organizations that would like to access the entire EPM solution through their browser and not have any client software installed on their PCs. It also makes sense for companies that would like to rent Project Professional licenses instead of buying them.

Remote Desktop access is also useful for report developers that want to use Excel to create Excel Services reports that directly access the database (available with Real-Time and Enterprise BI packages). Although database tables are not directly accessible from Excel running on a user's PC, they are accessible from Excel running on a Remote Desktop in the data center.

This option should also be chosen for users who who don't have a SharePoint-supported browser. The browsers supported by SharePoint are Internet Explorer 8 or higher as well as the latest version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari. With this option, users will connect to a Remote Desktop that has a supported browser that can access PWA.

In addition, Remote Desktop should be chosen for organizations that have bad network connections to the Internet. The reason is because certain Project Professional and PWA functions require a lot of back-and-forth communication with the Project Server. As a result, these functions can be slow for PWA users with a bad Internet connection that try to access them over the Internet directly through their browser. Performance is significantly improved for these functions when PWA is launched inside a Microsoft Remote Desktop (RDP) session in our data center.