I decided to create this post after spending a while figuring out what Microsoft had done with RDP (or Terminal Services) in Windows 7.

The feature that enables you to connect to your PC from anywhere and work from your familiar desktop has been available to anyone running installations of XP/Vista/7 Professional or above.

If you're reading this post, you may have already come across the problem of RDP being disabled in the Home editions of the OSes mentioned above. There is help, however, in the form of a (genius) patch. Several of the patches you can find in various forums/tech blogs address the lack of this feature in Windows 7 Home Premium before Service Pack 1. But attempts to apply the same patches to updated installations produce an error.

After hunting high and low, I found two sources for similar patches that work on Windows 7 SP1.

For Windows 7 users, here is the zip file that contains install.cmd (to be run as Administrator). It accepts command line switches, such as 'multi' (to enable multiple users) and will restore RDP to its useful state of accepting connections. This is an essential feature which should be available to everyone and not just those those that have Business or Professional editions. And given that so many of the early versions have been broken by SP1, I thought I'd make a working version available here.

The solution was to use a View in MySQL in the place of a custom_data table, and then use the {contact.custom_XX} tokens in CiviMail message templates. The steps were as follows:

1.   Install and test the Joomla AutoLogin extension from here
2.   From the CiviCRM menu, create a Custom Data set (for example, called 'DONOTEDIT') with 2 fields (user & passw).
3.   Make a note of the field IDs, as described here
4.   In MySQL, DROP the table 'civicrm_value_CUSTOM-DATA-NAME_X'
5.   For the autologin example, I used the following query to create a VIEW in MySQL:

SELECT civ_uf_match.id AS id,
civ_uf_match.contact_id AS entity_id,
jou.username AS user_XX,
jou.password AS passw_YY
FROM jos_users jou JOIN civicrm_uf_match civ_uf_match ON jou.id = civ_uf_match.uf_id;

It's now possible to include a link in a bulk email made up of custom tokens which contain data taken from a Joomla (user) table:

http://www.example.org/index.php?user={contact.custom_XX}&passw={contact.custom_YY}