Teamviewer

I was looking for a portable application similar to NetOp school to use in the computer lab.

The lab is poorly designed for teaching, the desks go side to side instead of front to back so it is very difficult to get round to help a student, and since you cannot see them or their screen they have to yell for help. Being able to share screens or to troubleshoot from the front desk would be useful. In addition, i was looking for a real-time collaboration programs for online courses, many years ago I had used ms netmeeting on win98 to do collaborative presentations.

Anyway, the search led me to Teamviewer (http://www.teamviewer.com) which has windows and mac versions and can be installed or run as a portable app from a USB stick. We downloaded and installed on a win XP machine, a macbook, a XP laptop and a dual G5 mac.

Installing, setup and connecting is pretty simple and within minutes i was controlling the mac screen from a PC and vice versa. There is a neat switch partner function which swaps the controlling computer. I was able to chat and look at programs and to show a powerpoint presentation (and make changes).

The program is simple to operate and there is a downloadable manual in .pdf format that runs to 85 pages!

Next test was to connect a webcam and to see if it would transmit video to the remote computer. I fished out an old Logitech Quickcam Pro 4000 from the junk box and hooked it up to the XP computer. Thanks to this old OS the camera drivers worked and within a minute i had video up. I was able to transmit the video from the camera from the XP machine to the OSX box.

Some tweaking of the camera was needed to get a reasonable picture, but black and white with no jitter produced a decent enough image. I then hooked up an even older logitech web cam to the Dual G5 but it did not recognize it and logitech's web site is a disaster for finding drivers for a product. So i fired up the macbook which has a webcam. Then i discovered a slight problem - the mac version is v4 while the windows version is v5 so certain functions, like a webcam are not supported on osx. A quick trip to the web site revealed osx 5 is still under development. Bummer.

So i fired up an old laptop with XP, hooked up the old logitech webcam and was able to send that really bad video to the desktop xp machine. I made a screen capture of the laptop vid window running on the xp box.

Unfortunately i was looking at the xp desktop instead of into the camera on the laptop! But hey it works. Unfotunately that old webcam does not have a built-in mic and neither does the old laptop so i did not try out the voice over IP function. I have a bag of mics in the office so we need to do that test in class.

The other neat thing about TeamViewer is that while it is not open source, it does have a free non-commercial use license. While limited, the free version does allow you to do most of the things you would like to test out. Would be nice if they had an educational version, then we could provide each student with a copy so they could chat/vid/work online as part of the online courses we offer.

Todo: - test out the portable version in the lab with the 9710 class along with the voice over IP

Also, as a lark i wondered what would happen if a pc running the program and connected to another pc then got connected to from the pc it was already connected to....sort of i cu you, you see me (old computer joke). Here is the result - an infinite loop of vid windows.