As promised, IntelliAdmin Enterprise Remote Control Beta 1 is now available for download.

For those of you in a hurry, here are bookmarks that will allow you to jump to the information you want

Description

Instructions

Pricing

Download Links

Bug Reports

Description

What is it?

It is a remote administration solution that allows you to find and control computers no matter where they are located. Got a sales team that moves from state to state? As long as they are on the Internet, you can get to their computer in seconds.

No need to look up an IP address, or open firewall ports – best of all, no monthly fees

Lets do an imaginary walk-through.

You are working at an insurance company. A user named Joel moves around to different branches during the day – sometimes he even works at home on his laptop. At any given time he might call you with an issue.

With stand alone remote control software you might have to find his IP address, or open ports on a firewall to get to that computer. Depending on Joel’s ability with the computer – this might take a long time.

With Enterprise remote control it can all be done in a few clicks.

You launch the client, and click the find button:

Start typing the user’s name, and the computer pops right to the top:

Double click, and you are able to see his screen and fix the problem quick.

One thing to note here. This information is updated in real-time. A user logs on to a computer, and within seconds the username is updated in the find window.

What about those laptops that are not connected to your domain? Seems like it would be hard to find those since the user name might be “Owner” or “Dell User”.

Tell the user to click that icon down by the time and they will see an easy to read System-ID:

Just start typing that six digit number into the find window, and you can drill down to that computer in seconds:

This works in the opposite direction too. You could be anywhere with a laptop, and still easily support computers on your network – all through a secured 256 bit AES encrypted connection.

Instructions

Server Setup

So how do you get this thing running on your network? First you need to setup the reflection server. It manages all of the connections. It will be the central point for all remote control activity. Start out by preparing a computer that has a static IP, can Listen on port 443 TCP/UDP, and is reachable by all of the computers you want to control (For example, it is directly on the internet, and port 443 can be reached from a public IP address). You can install the reflector on these versions of Windows: XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows 7.

Download and install the Enterprise Reflector Server on that computer. You can get a copy of it here

Run the install. A setup wizard will ask you a few questions.

Pick the port that the server will listen on:

I highly recommend staying with port 443. If you want to reach users that are on the road, this port is almost always left open at hotels, coffee shops, and airports.

On the next page you will select the initial user account that will have access. You can pick a Windows user account, or even select a Windows group – then all members of that group will have access. If you don’t want to use a Windows account, you can setup a stand-alone user account:

Click Next, and the server is setup. You can check the status, or manage the server by going to the start menu and clicking on the settings application:

Agent Setup

The agent is installed on the computers you would like to control. Download the agent software from here

During the install, a setup wizard will walk you through the steps:

It will ask for a description of the machine:

These are pre-filled with the settings in Windows. After the agent is installed, you can change them at any time by going into the computer settings on the reflector.

The next page you fill out your reflector settings. Make sure not to forget the port number for your reflection server. See the example in the screen shot below:

The user and password is the account you granted access when setting up the reflection server. Please note that the user and password information is not stored locally on the PC, and is only used to register the computer.

Press next, and the agent will register itself. After you press finish, the agent will startup and try to go online.

The agent will show its status by the color of the icon down by the time. If it is blue, then it is online with the reflector. If it is red, it is still trying to connect:

The beta is currently limited to 100 agents. Don’t think you will be installing that many yet, since when beta 2 comes out you will need to upgrade them manually to get the automatic update feature.

Client Setup

Great. You have your reflector setup, and at least one agent connected. How do we get to it? By installing the remote control client.

You can get your copy of the beta here

Install the client, and launch. Go to the settings button, and click on the “Reflector” Tab:

Enter the IP address or host name of your reflector server. Be sure to include the port by putting a colon and the port number after the IP address – the client is not smart enough yet to default to 443

The username and password is the account you setup when installing the reflector. Click OK, and now you can connect.

Simply click on the Find button, and your agent will show up.

Double click on it to connect.

Congratulations. Your setup is complete. Now you can remotely administer those computers from anywhere you can find an Internet Connection.

Pricing

This is the first question many of you asked when we announced the beta. Right now, almost all of the competing products are service based, and require a monthly fee.

With our Enterprise Remote Control, you pay a one time fee to purchase the software, and then run it yourself. No monthly fees that will break the bank.

Lets look at what some of the big boys charge:

Big Competitor #1: From $49 a PC to $40 a PC, depending on volume, per year
Big Competitor #2: From $179 a pc to $100 a PC, depending on volume, per year
Big Competitor #3: From $39 a pc to $50 a pc, depending on volume, per year.

So if you had 20 computers. It could easily run from $1000 to almost $4000 – per year!

Note that these are monthly payments that go on forever. Yes, they do provide a service for you, but what if you want to run it yourself? You got the server, the bandwidth, the smarts. Why pay a monthly fee?

Here is the pricing – only for beta testers, and at any time we could stop this deal, so get it while you can.

If you pre-order a license, before the beta ends, you can get an unlimited license for $599 US. No limits on the number of computers. A flat fee of $599, and you can get to those computers without ever paying a monthly fee again.

After the final version is released, the pricing will be per computer, and will start at $59 per computer.

Visit our online store to purchase a license today

Downloads

Reflector Server: Download Now

Agent: Download Now

Client: Download Now

Warning: This beta does not include an automatic update for the agent. It is quite possible you will need to re-install the agent on all computers in the final release. Keep that in mind when deploying this software. You will need to upgrade by hand. Beta 2 will include an automatic update

Bug Reports

This is the first beta, so we will be expecting those bug reports to come flooding in.

Please send them to:

beta@intelliadmin.com

That way we will get them in our bug tracking system and we can start working on them right away.

Lately many of you have been emailing us about getting our Remote Control product to work with Windows 7.

If you install the agent manually, or via an MSI group policy – not much to do, it should work right out of the box. Many of you like that automatic install feature, and Microsoft has put some roadblocks in your way to keep this from working.

Let me walk you through what you need to do to get this to work.

The first thing we need to allow access to is the admin share. This special share is automatically created when Windows is installed, but it is not available unless file and printer sharing is turned on.

This is disabled by default in Windows 7, and unfortunately Microsoft has yet again changed the method to turn it back on. The steps you need to take are now different than the ones you took in Vista.

How do you allow access to the admin share in Windows 7?

Start by going into the control panel.

Click on “Network and Internet”

Then click on “Network and Sharing Center”

A new window will be displayed. Look on the left side.

See the item that says “Change Advanced Sharing Settings” – Click on it.

Now you are shown different profiles.

The list can change depending on how your system is configured. Windows 7 will determine automatically what profile your network card is using. You may want to enable file and printer sharing on all of them, or limit it to the “Home or Work” profile for higher security.

Expand the profile you want to modify, and scroll down until you see “File and Printer Sharing”

Click on “Turn on file and printer sharing”

Save your changes.

Now, we need to make sure the remote registry service is set to automatic and is started. Again, like the admin share, this is on the computer you want to control.

You need to open the service manager. You can do this by clicking on the start button, and typing “services.msc”. It should show up in the top of your start menu.

Click on it, and a window will open. Scroll down until you find the service named “Remote Registry”:

Right click on it, and go to properties. Change the service to automatic, and start it up:

I wish I could say that is all you need to do, but unfortunately you also need to make a registry change.

Open regedit, and drill down to this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

Under this key you will need to create a new DWORD value called:

LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy

Set it to 1, and reboot.

Now the automatic install feature will work under Windows 7.

Back in 2007, I wrote an article about an error that you get in Outlook when you have too many attachments of the same name:

Even Outlook 2010 has this problem.

In the article, I walk you through deleting these files by hand.

It is not an easy thing to do. You need to open the registry, find a key…then use that key to find a random folder name.

I thought it would be cool if we could build a utility that would do this for you. So, that is what we did:

It will automatically scan your registry, find all Microsoft Outlook attachments, and then display them to you in the main window.

If it all looks like stuff you want to remove, you just hit the “Clean Up” button and it will delete them for you.

Here comes the bonus. You can run it silently from the command line.

What would you need that for?

You might have user that opens lots of attachments, and runs into this bug all the time.

Here is how you can have it run without any prompts:

OutlookCleanup.exe /SILENT


It will quietly scan through your registry and find the temp folder and empty it. Throw this in a batch file and have it run at logon – you will never have to deal with this problem again.

Another thought came to mind while working on this: This is a security problem too.

While email is on your Exchange server…it is relatively secure. Not knowing this you might open a sensitive document, read it, and when you are finished – delete it. Unknown to you, Outlook has just made a copy of it and it is sitting right there on your hard drive. Waiting for someone to grab.

Until MS provides a fix, you can use this little utility to keep your Outlook attachments clean. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for an update – this bug has been around since 2002.

Get your copy from our free downloads page

If you have ever had to reload your system, then you know the pain of trying to find all of your drivers.

I ran across a free tool called “Driver Backup”

It allows you to backup all of your current drivers, and it will even generate a special install script that you can run to automatically install them.

To use it, start out by downloading it from here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/drvback/

Extract the files, and run the main executable. It will show you all of the drivers it finds on your system. I ran it on a new Windows 7 x64 install:

Select the folder you want to backup your drivers to, and pick your options:

Select the option to generate a automatic install script. I highly recommend it since it makes the restore process a breeze.

Click backup, and it zooms through your drivers and copies them to the destination folder:

When it is finished, each driver is saved to a folder. That way, you can easily identify them:

If you picked the option I recommended above, it will also have an easy to use script that you can run to restore your drivers automatically:

Run it, and it will prompt you to restore them:

Awesome little utility. I will be using it after I get my drivers installed on a new system. Burn it to a DVD, and tape it to the side of the box. That way a format & reload will be a little less painful.

Every month I get a huge volume of questions about how to pick the right PC.  Lots of them are about specific machines, (“Should I buy PC X or PC Y?”), some are about features or specs (“What’s the best PC to run program _____?”), but most are to the effect of “I’m in the market for a new PC – do you have any advice on how to slice through the techno-speak so I can find the perfect one?”

The short answer is: “You bet!”

If you’re attending BlogHer ‘10, you can attend my session on exactly this topic.  If you’re not – and most of you aren’t - Ashley and I got together to shoot a short video on the subject.  In it we run through some of the most commonly asked questions about PC buying, and offer up answers to help you educate yourself on what to look for in a new PC.  Take a look:

I’ve also prepared a downloadable buyer’s guide that includes my favorite PC buying tips and tricks.  I hope you’ll find it handy as a pocket-sized reference to take with you to a retailer, or as a place to take notes as you’re shopping online. 

And remember, if you have a PC buying question or a question about a specific PC or component, or about anything else PC-related, find me on Twitter, leave a comment, or Ask Ben Anything via email.  I always try to answer as many personally as I can, and your question might appear in a future Ask Ben Anything Q&A column.

One more thing – be sure to follow Ashley on Twitter, too!  He’s the bearer of good news for contests and special offers and posts regularly on what our customers are doing with their Windows PCs.