When I first started out at ERE, we were running Citrix MetaFrame for a 45-person operation. Out of the 45 users, 10 were using MetaFrame to work from remote locations or at home. Of these 10 users, perhaps 4-5 were religious about remote connectivity.
Yet we spent money on having a 20-user connection license for Citrix, 20 user CAL's for Terminal Services, not to mention the expense of a Server, Windows Server Operating System and money spent to have someone come and set this all up. I didn't know Citrix then and this implementation is actually a big reason for my comments on consultants in my earlier post Step up or Back Up.
It seemed at the time and still today a shame to put money into a something we were just not ready for completely. Although it was cool to run all this technology and to become quite proficient in Citrix (we'll save that story for another day). Eventually we became a 125-person organization, with three locations and a mobile workforce that had us connecting 40-50 users remotely each day. We ran Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 and eventually we moved to a Cisco VPN. VPN or Citrix, we'll save that argument for another post. Through all the upgrading and learning from MetaFrame 1.8 up to the Cisco VPN solution, it would have been great to have something that was more cost effective.
I recently discovered a product call WallCooler VPN. The product comes in three flavors:
Standard: This provides Remote Desktop Connection, Access files from remote system within your local applications. Or open File shares on the remote computer.
Professional: Provides all the features of a full VPN solution. Including the ability to map drives, print remotely and access network shares.
Enterprise: Easily installs as a service with minimum configuration. Configure stand-alone or multi-site VPN's, supports up to 50 users.
The product is simply to install and setup, create a free user account and launch the software or service. The system automatically finds the systems and connection is a click away. Security is not a concern as WallCooler VPN uses dual SSL security encryption.
Standard version is free and unlimited in access to a remote machine. The Professional version allows 1 user up to three connections and starts at a price of $15.95 a month. The Enterprise edition starts at 5 users and hosts a maximum of 50 users with 10 simultaneous connections. The price starts at $29.95 a month (for 5 users). Both offers have a 20% discount if sign on for a year.
The prices are a fraction of what you would pay for a VPN solution this good and you would need to configure and manage the entire solution in-house. While I'll admit I love the easy administration, it also makes me a bit queasy. I am a bit of a control freak with my network and I hate to turn over anything to an outside source. However, for an SMB with limited financial resources here is an affordable or perhaps even free VPN solution depending on your needs. For a 1 or 2 person IT shops that do not need anything except an easy way to remotely administrate a system. Alternatively, perhaps for a large organization that does not have enough of a need to spend the money on a full VPN solution, since only a handful of people would use the remote capabilities. Here's a simply affordable and easy to install and manage tool to make your world A Better Window World.
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Ron Barrett is president of RARE-TECH, an IT Training and consulting company. He has been a technology professional for over a decade, working for several major financial firms and dotcoms. Barrett is a specialist in network infrastructure, security and IT management.
He is a co-author of The Administrator's Guide to Microsoft Office 2007 Servers, How to Cheat at Administering Office Communications Server 2007, and the Real MCTS/MCITP Exam 620 Preparation Kit and has been a contributor to Windows 2000 Enterprise Storage Solutions and Exam Cram –70-244-Supporting & Maintaining NT Server 4.
He has also contributed to several industry magazines and was featured in the book Tricks of the Windows Vista Masters. He has worked for Microsoft writing research and analysis documents for Windows Server 2008, Windows HPC, and PerformancePoint Server 2007. He has also created screencasts on Windows Server 2008 Administration for Linux Admins.
Subscribe to Ron Barrett's A Better Windows World feed.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Consider purchasing an SSL VPN appliance.....
At ~$360 per year for a 5 user Enterprise client, it may be less expensive to use an SSL VPN appliance such as the Sonicwall SSL VPN 200. (MSRP: $595) (Disclaimer: I'm a Sonicwall Partner). My quick calculation show that in the third year the appliance investment, plus annual support and firmware subscription renewals, costs less than the investment for the outsourced solution. The savings are a bit more when renewals are purchased in multi-year SKU's.
There are other budget appliances, but I do not have direct experience with them.
Still, it's nice to know there is a solution for even smaller clients.
Free low-TCO VPN
www.Hamachi.cc / log me in is available for free (private) or low cost for companies. There are actually a bunch of competitors to the software-VPN mentioned in the article. The standard construction is a software-VPN via P2P and a mediator server to break through NAT firewalls. Hamachi has the most trustable secure architechture -- they even explain it on the site! Though I liked it better as "Hamachi", now since long they're "eaten" by the more cash-flow before user-happiness oriented "Log me in".
Our experience with WallCooler
Hi Ron,
thanks for this article, in a way it saved us a great deal of time and money: we discovered wallcooler after reading this blog. I thought I'd put my bit here hoping it will help other businesses the way it helped us.
We are a small company here in Seattle (WA) based in a managed office, dealing with about 6 remote users (mostly sales and home based).
Taking the office manager's remote access solution was a complete blast (way too expensive $80/user/month + setup fees).
A hardware VPN is, of course, out of the question since there is no inbound traffic allowed unless you go with the office manager's solution; To be fair, we wouldn't have gone for that anyway since we are not IT specialists to start opening ports, natting stuff, paying up front $XXX for something we don't really know how to work, maintain, monitor...
We tried other remote screen tools mentioned here and elsewhere, and didn't find them very suitable: quite expensive for 5 users and we had to install the software on all computers (that was 12 PCs for our 6 users!).
We have been using WallCooler Ent for 6 weeks now and will renew for a year in 2 weeks to get the discount. What made it for us was ease of installation (we use RDP for remote control) and file sharing.
I just wish I had come across your article earlier: that would have saved us time, money and headaches!
Many thanks and I'm very grateful for the article.
John
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