Optimized desktop sharing viewer join

Embodiments herein are designed to counteract the negative effects of an attendee join in a remote session by employing several techniques. One technique maintains and determines maximum decoding capabilities of viewers, which are then used to determine, e.g., a least common denominator of encoding available. As such, a sharer can dynamically modify (either up or down) the encoding of the graphics stream without having to renegotiate decoding capabilities for each viewer upon a join/disjoin. In order to assist in resetting viewer state based on the above encoding technique, other embodiments provide for: context reset for delta and/or other types of order encoding; reset for all sharer and viewer caches; and reset of history for compression context. Another technique provides for delaying the joiner of attendees (and thus the reset of the graphics stream) based on a myriad of static and dynamic policy factors.