Symantec on Tuesday ramped up the beta of its service, Symantec Online Remote Access, intended to let small businesses and individuals remotely take control of a distant PC, transfer files and print to a targeted device.

Symantec Online Remote Access, offered for free during a planned 90-day beta period with pricing not yet announced, is the third software-as-service offering Symantec has begun providing this year under the Symantec Protection Network (SPN) brand at www.spn.com.   

The other two are Online Backup and Online Storage for Backup Exec, which start at about $10 for 10GB of storage. Online Remote Access is intended to be a service providing much of the functionality of Symantec’s pcAnywhere admin tool, but it uses a different host application, and is a lot more flexible.

“The core functionality is the same,” says Mike Baldwin, senior manager of product management at Symantec Protection Network about how Online Remote Access compares with pcAnywhere. But the differences between the new service and the PCAnywhere admin tool are considerable.

The pcAnywhere tool lets network administrators take control of distant machines running the client software for it, but the admins would need to know a lot about the network location of the machine and other technical details.

In contrast, Online Remote Access, which requires the endpoint to run the same Symantec Protection Network host application that’s used in the Symantec online backup and storage services, doesn’t make the same technical demands on the  user.

The remote-access service, which can be accessed from any Web-based computer, automatically goes out to find the machine because the machine running the alert is continuously reporting its network whereabouts back to the Symantec data center.

“The agent is always alerting our data center about its location,” Baldwin says. He adds that Symantec is using 256-bit Advanced Encryption Algorithm encryption to establish secure links for the service.

The service lets the user establish authentication controls to remotely gain access to a PC to work as though physically present with the remote computer. Workers can transfer files and carry out remote printing processes. There are a number of competing services available, including GoToMyPC, which also provide remote-access control of a PC for similar purposes.