Grant Users RDP Access to Your Azure Virtual Machine (classic)

After several hours of trial and error with outdated posts on Microsoft's Azure blog and other sites I finally was able to setup a virtual machine that other users could turn on / off and connect to using Remote Desktop. Here is a brief summary of the steps.

Access to Azure Portal

Locate the cloud service (classic) under http://portal.azure.com that hosts the virtual machine(s)

Expand the Settings of the service and locate the Users section

Add a user to to the service using their Microsoft account. For the role select "Classic Virtual Machine Contributor"

RDP Access to Virtual Machine

Start the virtual machine and add a local user to Windows.  

Add the user to the list of approved users for RDP (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/remote-desktop-connection-faq#1TC=windows-7).

Follow the steps here to give the user access to the virtual machine via Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-windows-reset-rdp/