During our tests Altiris bought Previo's eSupport Essentials technology, including Remote Assistant. Altiris says it will offer eSupport Essentials PC recovery utilities but considers Carbon Copy its remote-control solution of choice, replacing Remote Assistant. This removed Previo from the competition. In addition, Vector Networks licenses the NetSupport product and resells it as PC-Duo. PC-Duo looks and feels exactly like NetSupport Manager. Hence, we did not test PC-Duo but gave it the benefit of NetSupport Manager's performance results. We also did not include it in our report card. We did, however, scrutinize the feature set and included that information in our features chart.
Our Editor's Choice award goes to NetSupport Manager 7. NetSupport offers optimal performance in a full-featured remote-control application with plenty of enterprise-level configuration, installation and management options. Although it did not receive top scores in raw performance testing, NetSupport supplied the right mix of performance and features. It edged out second place CrossTec's NetOp Remote Control by providing hardware and software inventories, audio chat and host support for multiple inbound connections. And though third-place finisher Symantec pcAnywhere provides directory integration, NetSupport maintains support for DOS, IBM OS/2 and Microsoft Win16 and Win32 systems and provides administrators with a "client scanning" feature to scroll through multiple desktops in a single window. These three products are profiled below. Read about the others we tested online.
Although it doesn't support LDAP or NTLM and is not a component of an enterprise desktop-management suite, NetSupport Manager is a comprehensive remote-control solution that can be centrally deployed and managed in the enterprise. NetSupport ranked fourth in transferring bitmaps and sixth in file transfers. These scores, together with the full range of remote-control features and a competitive price, put it ahead of CrossTec's NetOp Remote Control and Symantec's pcAnywhere.
NetSupport has two main code components, the control (master) and the client (host). The control and the client code can reside on the same machine. In addition to a straightforward CD installation, NetSupport offers a network-installation method in which setup, license and configuration files are copied onto a central server. Users can browse to this directory and execute the setup file.
We were impressed with the NetSupport Deploy Utility, which lets network administrators push install NetSupport onto workstations without any host interaction. In addition, the utility can update license information and client configurations and even uninstall the package remotely. The utility gave us a list of available networks along with domain and workgroup information. We selected the host onto which we wanted to install the package and the necessary configuration files, then clicked "deploy" and the package was installed. Deploy Utility also gave us a detailed report of successful and failed deployments.
Masters interact with hosts in one of three modes: watch, share and control. In watch mode, the host is viewed passively. In share mode, the host shares the control of its PC with the master. In control mode, the master takes control of the host computer by locking the user's keyboard and mouse. The client-scanning option let us view multiple host screens in a single window; the scan interval can be set to cycle through different screens.
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