Mobile Workforce: Remote Access For Mobile Professionals - Part 3
Posted by Daryl Rinaldi on Mon, Apr 12, 2010 @ 05:30 PM
As a leading Boston area IT Support company we are often are asked to provide a way for our customers to remotely access their network. This is the 3rd part of our 3-part blog on alternative methods of remote access.
Another way to get remote access to your work PC is to install a service such as Logmein (www.logmein.com) or GoToMyPC (www.gotomypc.com). There are other such services but these are the 2 market leaders. You simply go to their respective websites and sign up for an account. Both charge for a full-featured account. Gotomypc is $19.95/month. Logmein Pro is $12.20/month. Both have annual subscriptions with a lower monthly cost. Both do the same thing and work very similarly. We prefer logmein. We use a special version of logmein for IT services companies so we are very familiar with it and can vouch for it being a very solid, robust product that very rarely has problems. Plus Logmein has a free version that you can use. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the Pro version but it provides remote access, remote printing, and file transfer which are the 3 main features most people need.
Once you sign up for an account you add the computer that you want to remotely access. To add the computer you install an agent on that computer and that makes that PC accessible via the website. Thereafter you can log into your account on the website from any computer and remotely access your work PC (where you have the agent installed). When you are remotely logged in allyour keystrokes and mouse movements are happening on your work computer. It is just as if you were sitting at your desk. You can transfer files to and from your computer and you can print from your work PC locally to a printer that is connected to the remote PC.
These services are very easy to install, they are very reliable, they are easy to use, and you will love the flexibility to be able to remotely access your work PC anywhere you can get online. Forgot that important document at the office? No need to get back in the car on a rainy night and drive back to the office. Just log in in 5 minutes and grab it.
Of course since you now have setup remote access you really should be sure to use strong passwords (remember use a passphrase not a password). But you do need 2 passwords to get access - the password to your logmein (or gotomypc) online account and then the password to access your PC. So as long os you use reasonably strong passphrases these solutions are pretty safe.
If you don't have remote access I encourage you to get it. It will simplify your life and give you a flexibility that you make you wonder why you didn't do it sooner.
PS. Teamviewer (www.teamviewer.com) is another such solution. One nice thing about this solution is that either the target or remote PC can be a Mac or a Windows PC. So you can control a PC from a Mac and vice versa. We've used teamviewer and it seems to work well and is also easy to install and easy to use.