One thing you may have always wanted to do was to access your office computer from a remote location and print locally. You May be at home or setting up another office branch and need hard copies or attachments you can send via email. Setting up a system for remote access and printing is surprisingly easy. For example you may need to access QuickBooks or MYOB via the Internet and print an invoice. Opening a database over the Internet is asking for trouble so the solution is to take control of a PC via the Net. In other words you take control of the office computer so it acts like a slave so no crucial data actually flows over the Net.
One thing you need to keep in mind is when anyone remotely accesses a computer at the office; nobody at the office can use it. It truly becomes a slave. It is the same as two people trying to use the same computer, simultaneously. It is not a problem if it is your own computer at the office. It becomes a problem if it is a shared PC or a third party from another location needs to access the database. In this case you will need to network another simple PC system to act as a slave at the office. We are assuming here that the software is a multi-user version suitable for use on a network.
When viewing the office slave via the Internet, a window will open on your PC monitor which is an exact replica of the slave. By using your own mouse and keyboard you can input data and commands. The next step is to setup a method of printing. One way is to use Adobe Acrobat software to act as a printer. When printing an invoice to Acrobat it will create a portable document file or PDF. PDF files are easy and safe to send via the internet and they print out easily. By printing and storing these PDF files to a common folder on the slave PC you can retrieve them via the Internet and if needed print them on your local printer. Another method would be to email them to your address. Business accounting software usually has this built-in email feature.
The last item that needs to be addressed is how is a remote connection accomplished? There are several ways to connect two computers via the Internet. One of the easiest methods is with free software called Ultra VNC. By doing a search on Google you will find the Ultra VNC site where you can download the software. The office computer needs to be setup as the server, while the remote PC only needs the viewer feature of the software installed. The setup procedure is very straight forward if you use the default settings. It is just a matter of following the prompts when running the install procedure. There is a FAQ section at the download site.
The VNC software includes an easy to use file transfer utility for communicating with the slave PC at the office. You can use this utility for retrieving the PDF files for printing on your local computer.
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