[Intro]
Welcome to Product Spotlight, I'm Benjamin Higginbotham and I'm going to be talking about one of my all time favorite products, the LogMeIn suite of Products. What LogMeIn will allow me to do is literally log in to my machine wherever I am. I could have a desktop at work, I could be out in some other country, as long as I have Internet access I can access my desktop from a screen sharing standpoint, from a file sharing standpoint, I can even get statistics on the box depending on which product I get.

There are three products we'll be talking about today: LogMeIn Free, LogMeIn Pro and LogMeIn IT Reach. Now if you're an existing IT professional you've probably heard of programs such as VNC. VNC is also a remote sharing tool, it's cross platform and it's free, it's open source. The disadvantage of VNC is that it reall has a hard time with network address translation, so if you've got a private network and you want to get your VNC connection out there it just doesn't do so good. Where LogMeIn IT Reach, LogMeIn Pro and LogMeIn Free do a great job is they will break through your NAT so wherever you are, wherever your host computer and your destination computer are, it doesn't matter, you'll be able to access it. And that's why I like the product. It's also extremely secure. It's encrypted, it's a great product. So, lets take a look at it, and lets do that on the road.

[Panera Bread]
So I'm at my local favorite restaurant, one that happens to have free WiFi which is a very good thing. And you know what, I'm having a business meeting and I really want to have access to some of those files that were on my work computer that I just didn't remember to bring with me or maybe I'm using a friends computer, I just don't have access to it. So I log in to the LogMeIn web site by going to http://www.logmein.com. Now here I've got my three accounts: Free, Pro and IT Reach. I'll go ahead and log into the free account. It's going to automatically connect to this and you'll see that it asks for a username and password. This is the same username and password that you use on your Windows box, so if you change your password on your Windows box it will automatically change on your Free account or Pro or IT Reach account as well. So I'll enter my password. It's not connecting and I've got three options but basically it's one option and that is to remote control my remote computer. So I'll go ahead and hit 'Go' to remote control. And it will automatically open up the screen on my remote computer which had the Technology Evangelist web site open. You also have this little guy right up over here that basically says this computer is now being remote controlled so if someone is working at the computer they know someone is now controlling it, it's not possessed. I'm going to go ahead and go into full screen mode, so now I can actually give a presentation. If I had a PowerPoint presentation here or if there were web sites that were behind my VPN or in my own internal network and I didn't want to deal with trying to VPN in and then find the right address, if I just knew that it was here I can simply use the free account and get over there. And thats great, but what if I want to transfer files very easily? So I'll go ahead and get out of this, and we're going to go to a Pro account now.

So I've also set up a Pro account. I've got remote control like you saw before right over here, I've also got my file manager, guest invite and file share. Those are three new options that you didn't see before. File manager's a nifty little item. So lets lay I got that PowerPoint presentation on that desktop computer and I want to bring it to my local computer. Now you see that I've got two panes. Over here I've got my local computer and over here I've got my remote computer. I can go over here and go to the Windows directory and I believe there's a clock.avi file that comes with every version of Windows. We'll take that and I'm going to just go ahead and drag that directly to my C:\ drive. Do I want to copy that selected file to my local computer? It's going to begin copying that and now if I go to my C:\ drive you'll see the wondrous animation of clock.avi.

Alright, so the next option over here is guest invite. What I can do from here and actually I'm not going to do it right now, but it gives me the ability to invite someone else to come look at my computer. I click on it I enter their e-mail address and they get an e-mail saying hey, click here and you'll be able to view Ben's computer, and they'll be able to then remotely control it. That's great if I'm giving a presentation, it's kinda like a poor man's WebEx as it were.

The next option is the file share option. I've got these huge e-mail files. I work in graphics, I work in video and these files are just ginormous. They're way too big for e-mail, what I can do is I can go into file share, I'm going to say start sharing some files. I'll select what file I want to share. Once again we're going to select that clock.avi. Not exactly a big file but it kinda shows the message. We'll scroll down to clock.avi, and this is on my remote computer. What do you want to call it? How many number of downloads do you want to have? And how long do you want to share this file for? So I'll click on next over here, and how do I want to send the file? Automatically or do I want to use my own e-mail client? I'm going to say automatically so I don't have to open up my e-mail client over here. I'll type in an e-mail address and some file information. This is what it's going to look like and you'll see they'll receive this e-mail. When they click on this link here they're going to be able to actually download that file. This is fantastic! Now instead of having to get the bounceback messages of I'm sorry the file was too big user can't get it or I'm sorry this file extension is not allowed, all you have to do is send this, it's just a link in the e-mail. They click and they're finally able to get those large e-mails that you couldn't get before.

The last option is IT Reach. Now this is my own personal favorite because I do a lot of consulting for a lot of different companies and I have to be able to access boxes and I have to be able to get alerts when something is going wrong. You'll see that this IT Reach screen is much more complex than anything else out there. This is not designed for a general consumer. This is designed for the techies that run the servers, the techies who need to be able to see stuff. This is an incredibly powerful product and this is the one that I have deployed on just about every machine that I've got.

You'll notice that the screen is actually broken down, I can see of all my network traffic, I can see the different types of CPUs, I can see what's installed, I can see all the different events and the error logs that are going on without ever having to log into the box. The best part about this is I can actually set up alerts. If the CPU is hitting 90% for 10 minutes and hasn't gone back down, LogMeIn will actually e-mail me or page my phone saying hey there may be something wrong here, you may want to log in and take a peek.

Just like before I have remote control, I have file manager, file share, guest invite. I've also got some chatting options. I also have direct computer management so I can go in, if there's a specific that's run away so I've got a leaking process, or I've got something that's eating all of my memory... directly from the LogMeIn... I'll go ahead and click on services... Directly from the LogMeIn area here I can start and stop my services, I can go into my processes I can go in here and say you know what, lets go ahead and end this process. I can see the registry and I can edit the registry right from here. I've got full control over this machine right here. I can even reboot the machine, I can have it do just about anything. I have got ultimate control over any server or any workstation.

So this is great, I'm working on a PC, but what if I'm not in a store? What if I don't have a laptop available to me right here? What if I want to use a different platform? Lets see what my options are there.

[Apple Store]
Alright, so we've done PC to PC, we've done that remotely, but what if I want to go PC to Macintosh? What if I'm walking around a mall and I need access to a server and I've got an Apple Store? They have free bandwidth, they have computers that I can access stuff on. They have really good computers I can access stuff on. Here I've got a copy of Safari open. I'm not using any PC emulation software whatsoever on a MacBook Pro. I'm going to go in here, I've got my IT Reach session up. I'll hit remote control, and it's actually instead of using and ActiveX control it's actually going to use a Java applet. So it's a little bit different. I've logged in, I've got remote control here. I'll open up Internet Explorer, this is on that remote machine. I'll go in here and I'll actually say full screen so I can watch this full screen. This works great, so now I can access it from any Apple computer. I can also access this by the way through Linux. Anything that can be controlled through Java has access to this. Once again host machine is Windows only. I can't host it on my Macintosh and I can't host it on my Linux box.

What if I really truly want to do this on the go? What if I want to do this from... some other device?

[Car]
Another great option for on the road access is using your Windows Mobile 5 powered device, such as a Treo 700wx that has EVDO access. Anywhere I've got cellular system I can get to LogMeIn. I go to the LogMeIn web site in Pocket Internet Explorer. Enter my username and password. And here we have the three systems in my account: Free, IT Reach and Pro. I'll go ahead and log in to IT Reach. Because it's EVDO it's a little bit slower than what you would have with WiFi or with a broadband Internet connection, but it still does a really good job. You're going to have to be a little more patient though because your upload speed is drastically slower and your latency is much, much higher. If you've got a problem on the road though, invaluable tool. I'm going to log in here, and now I've got access to the actual computer, the IT Reach portion of this computer you can see here. System Information gives you general system stats, remote control, file manager, processes, services, you can read the whole list right there. I can even reboot the computer right from this screen.

I'll go ahead and go into remote control to show you how cool that is. I actually am able to log into the system on my Treo 700wx and view the desktop. Here you can see the desktop has just popped up. Now it's a small screen so I have different viewing options, I can go in here, I can say view and scale to fit so it fits the whole screen on there. Now it's teeny tiny, I can't read any of the text. I'll go in here, I'll say view, zoom to, we'll say 50%. Little bit larger, I can actually start reading some of the text, I can see what's going on. I can actually then, if I have to restart a certain process or copy a file, move a file or do whatever I need to do, I actually have the ability to see it at this particular zoom level and still navigate around the screen. That's a very cool option. I've also got left click, right click, I've go t control/alt/delete so function keys and whatnot built right into the device.

That's the LogMeIn suite of products. We can go from a Macintosh to a Linux box to a Windows box all the way down to my Windows Mobile 5 device. Just about anything that's Internet connected can remotely control and actually talk to my remote servers. It's a great line of products, I highly suggest you check it out. It's at http://www.logmein.com.

I'm off, since I don't have to be anywhere near my servers, I'm going someplace much warmer than this. See ya!