Product Reviews

Apple Remote Desktop 3 is the latest version of the admin-oriented remote-control software for administrating and taking charge of Macs from across a network. With this utility, after you enable Apple Remote Desktop sharing in System Preferences on your various client Macs, you can show the remote machine's display in a window or in full-screen mode on your own Mac and perform a wide range of operations on it from the comfort of your own desk.

Client Macs don't need anything more than the Apple Remote Desktop sharing option checked in the Sharing pane in System Preferences. They may need updating, but as long as the version in place is at least 1.2 (as will be the case with later versions of OS X 10.3), even this can be done remotely once sharing is turned on.

Connection revolves around IP addresses. Available machines are found using Bonjour, network address range searches, address or DNS name lookup or, if necessary, by importing a list of network addresses or DNS names. Basically, if you know the remote address of a client Mac accessible over the Internet, you can control it from anywhere online. Further, Bonjour means local network use is a doddle.

Speed is, of course, a constant issue. The preview of a remote Mac on your network requires a great deal of data to be transferred across your network. In case of bandwidth problems, you can reduce the image quality. There are two colour settings, one four-bit greyscale setting and one black-and-white bitmap option that dithers the display massively, but drops down the necessary throughput.

As well as observing, sharing control of the cursor and keyboard input, and generally being able to act as a user sitting in front of the remote machine, you can share the clipboard between your admin Mac and the one you're controlling, collect reports from the various clients on the network, upgrade the Remote Desktop client software remotely, and a number of other similarly powerful routines.

For network administrators, one big trick up this utility's sleeve is software distribution. Use Apple Remote Desktop 3 to install or copy software to various machines across the network; update applications, documents, fonts and even the Mac OS itself.

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Asset management is another invaluable feature - use this to generate in-depth user and application usage reports, and complete inventories of installed hardware and software. Because this software lets you do all of these things remotely, you save time and effort, and you don't have to disrupt other users.

You can run tasks immediately, but more usefully for admin use, you can schedule them to run at a specific date and time, or save them for use at some point in the future. Package installers can be controlled to a fair level, to the point of choosing the network bandwidth usage, and network data traffic can be encrypted when installing packages and even when copying data.

Apple Remote Desktop can work with Macs that have a virtual network computing (VNC) client installed and running, not just Remote Desktop clients. However, it won't work with PCs running VNC software. If you need this kind of feature, you'll need to try Timbuktu or a pure VNC solution, although the latter certainly won't have nearly as many handy features.

The new version of Remote Desktop includes a Smart List feature, which is a way to filter computers that match certain criteria. For some administrators, this alone would justify the software's cost. Make a new Smart List and you can filter for computers that match IP address ranges, specific machine models, Mac OS versions, amount of installed RAM and more. Setting up a Smart List is simple, although it isn't without its bugs. For example, the modifier pop-up menu in the Smart List settings always says Contains, Starts With, Ends With and Is, even for options such as Installed RAM. Perhaps an update will attend to this.

Other new features in version 3 include the ability to carry out Spotlight searches on client machines that have Tiger installed, support for Automator actions, and a Widget that allows you to monitor clients on your network from Dashboard. There are also new, more powerful copying features, application usage and user history reports, as well as a Curtain mode, which allows you to make changes to a client without it being seen on the client machine. Further, version 3, as you would expect, is a Universal Binary, so will run natively on Intel Macs.

Apart from the Smart List glitch, the only issue we had with Apple Remote Desktop was its price. It's an excellent tool and will be a major help for network administrators and specialist support experts alike. However, a 10-client licence costs £199, while if you want an unlimited client licence, you'll need to find £349. Of course, we have to remember that this is a well-tuned, specialist tool with excellent features and client support already built into every Mac running OS X 10.3 or 10.4. VNC alternatives are free, but with Remote Desktop, you really do get what you pay for.