SingleClick adds remote access to home-network management software

Increasingly, business users face the same problem when they're away from home as they do when they're away from the office: How do I access the information on my networked devices easily and securely? SingleClick Systems has a solution: new remote-access software for its HomeNet Manager application.

The new software, unveiled at this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is intended to let mobile users remotely access data and devices on their home network from notebooks or handheld devices, including smart phones. Users set up a remote-access account on SingleClick's servers, log on, and have a Web-based view into their network, seeing live video from a security camera, or uploading or downloading files to a network-attached storage (NAS) box. They even can grant guest access to selected files or folders, or to network devices.

In effect, HomeNet Manager with these new remote-access features is like having a personal online-storage service, YouTube, and music library on one's residential or small-office/home-office (SOHO) network.

HomeNet Manager has more than 20 million users worldwide, but most of them probably have never heard of this Edontown, N.J., vendor, founded in 2003. That's because most of its business is through OEMs, who rebrand the application as their own, as Dell does with its Dell Network Assistant. The company also offers a business version called OfficeNet Manager for the SOHO and small-business markets.

HomeNet Manager is the foundation application. It loads onto each PC in a network, and looks inward -- to discover and analyze the devices on the network, and outward -- to assess the external, service-provider network, to determine the available bandwidth and to identify potential problems.

To see and work with the results, users select from three browser-based views of their network. One is a very basic, cleanly designed set of panels with a strong, task-oriented design. For example, one panel is labeled "I want to . . ." and below it are tasks such as "share folders within my home network."

For more tech-savvy users, a second view offers greater technical details. Finally, a graphical layout of a generic home lets users drag and drop PCs and network devices into various rooms in the house; HomeNet Manager will set up shared files or printers, automatically making the necessary changes in Microsoft Vista, Windows 2000 and XP, and copying and installing the appropriate drivers.

Version 3 added support for wireless routers, access points and clients. The same kind of automated and wizard-driven installation and management simplifies the creation and troubleshooting of home wireless LANs, says SingleClick CEO and founder Scott Zarkiewicz. The software configures security automatically for a wireless router using Wired Equivalent Privacy or the much stronger Wi-Fi Protected Access. "It's not perfect, but it works well, and it's effective for the vast majority of attacks," he says.

The new SingleClick Remote Access application is integrated with HomeNet Manager 4.0 (though it's also available as a stand-alone Windows PC program). The new software has two components besides the remote-access feature: remote PC control and a digital media manager. The latter brings SingleClick into a whole new area: helping users create, organize and share a fast-growing storehouse of pictures, videos, movies and music.