Twelve Black Code Monkeys

My family came in for the Thanksgiving Day weekend and I was lamenting with my brother-in-law, a fellow geek, about how I ran into a bunch of problems accessing email from work. I use a hosted exchange account that lets me access my email via a web-based “Outlook Web Access.” Unfortunately, though, this only works in Internet Explorer and you need to have ActiveX enabled and be able to install new ActiveX components. It just so happens that on the system I’m working on I can’t do this. This leaves me with a couple more options. One is to access email via a very dumbed down text-based interface. As it happened, this interface was not working on Tuesday. Normally, what I end up doing is just using my phone to send and receive email. This works ok, but I really can’t type long messages in it as it takes forever typing on the little keyboard. Also as it happens, I occasionally leave my phone at home, or it runs out of juice at some point, becoming unusable.

So my brother-in-law was telling me about this remote access tool that he uses called LogMeIn. I decided to install it at home and see how it worked. The install was simple and I didn’t need to fiddle with router settings at all. I tried it from another computer on my home network, but it should work the same from anywhere since it’s going out to the internet and back in via a browser. That’s how this works. You establish your home computer as a host and set up an account at LogMeIn.com, then you connect to that account over the web via a remote location. You see your desktop and any applications as you would, albeit a bit more slowly.

Remote control apps have been around for a long time and I remember hearing about Citrix years ago. The nice thing about this, is that at least for the types of things I would use it for, it’s free. LogMeIn has more premium services that you pay for, some of which I’m sure would be very useful to business users. A number of nice things I’ve noticed so far:

• You can access your desktop via various methods, including ActiveX and Java.
• You can access it via any system that can run a java-enabled web-browser
• You can change screen resolutions and desktop panning options on the fly without having to reconnect, etc.
• You can change the number of colors that it uses on the fly. This way, if you don’t need lots of colors (for displaying photos for example), you can decrease them, which will result in speedier displays.

Not only can I access my regular Outlook account, but Trillian, and just about anything else on my computer. No more worrying about whether I copied a file I was working on at home onto a key drive, or sending myself email with the file. Just log in. Seems pretty simple!

Of course, I haven’t tried this out for an extended period of time, but my brother-in-law seems to have been using it successfully for some time. Might be a good option for those of you who are always connected to the internet at home via a high-speed connection and whose corporate networks don’t allow a whole lot in terms of email access, IM, etc.