I imagine what they were thinking is "maybe people shouldn't be logging on to individual servers in order to manage them." I manage a number of 2012 VMs, and a

I imagine what they were thinking is "maybe people shouldn't be logging on to individual servers in order to manage them." I manage a number of 2012 VMs, and actually log onto them via RDP very rarely. You should use RSAT on a workstation, or perhaps Powershell and Enter-PSSession (alias: etsn) in order to manage your machines. If you're a masochist you could even use winrs.exe from inside cmd.exe. I can't think of much you can do with those two tools that you can't do otherwise, unless it involves [random third-party software]. Even with third party software, I don't see a reason people should be logging on to servers often enough that the start screen should be an appreciable problem -- especially since the start screen is likely to have an immediately obvious and clickable 100px*100px "tile" to get to the software you need to.