Released in November, version 4.3 of RealVNC’s VNC Enterprise Edition (VNC EE) builds on the capabilities of the open source Virtual Network Computing (VNC) remote access system to cater for corporate environments.

The package is designed to facilitate home working and business collaboration, as well as remote system maintenance and support. The system also comes in a Personal Edition version.

VNC EE uses a peer-to-peer architecture that requires no centralised server. A VNC server component must be installed on clients to allow remote control. This can be done manually or by using a deployment tool available from RealVNC’s web site. Users who require remote access to those systems need to run the VNC Viewer.

We tested version 4.3.2 of VNC EE, which adds support for Mac OS X 10.5, with a variety of desktop and server systems. Installing VNC Server on our Windows Server 2003 system was simple and required about 3.3MB of system memory. We used a Dell Precision M50 laptop with Windows XP Professional to run the VNC Viewer, which took up 900KB of memory.

One of the strengths of VNC EE is the wide range of operating systems it supports. Windows 95, 98 Me, 2000, XP, CE and Vista are all supported, as are HPUX, Java-based systems, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris. This means VNC EE can be used by Windows users to access Linux applications.

On the security front, the package uses 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard to secure connections and uses 2048bit RSA keys for secure authentication. The Viewer also keeps a log of all VNC EE sessions.

Another corporate focused feature is its ability to integrate with Microsoft Active Directory, which allows users to authenticate remotely with their existing usernames and passwords.

Connecting to a remote system was easy. All we had to do was key in a host name or IP address, followed by a password. To speed up the connection, we set up the Viewer to display just 64 colours while the Server was configured to disable user interface effects, such as wallpaper or background patterns.

The Viewer interface features a title bar that allows users to perform a range of actions with a single click, such as sending ctrl-alt-delete. Transferring files between local and remote Windows systems is also straightforward. All we had to do is highlight the file or files we wanted to move and transfer them using copy and paste commands. It would have been nice to have been able to drag and drop files, but this is only a minor quibble.

Transferring files from Unix and Mac systems requires users to select Share Files from the VNC Server status bar menu and browse to the file or directory they want to copy. The files can then be transferred using the F8 menu. The transfer rate is dependent on the upload data transfer rate of the system from which you are transferring the file.