SDSI - Synergetic Data Systems, Inc. launched a new website recently. If you haven't visited in a while, check it out. They are the makers of UnForm and General which many of you are familiar with.

    Allen of SDSI recently contributed an MD5 function to our code section.

    I just wanted to take a moment to thank Steve Litwak of Coast Data Systems for sending a donation in. Hundreds of visitors a week come to the site for information, example code and help with ProvideX - often saving themselves hours of struggle, or discovering something new that will benefit their business. Steve felt it was worth it. Do you?

    While I'm at it I'll thank past donators Stephane Devouard of Optims and Phil Whirley of BCS. There might have been one or two others a long time that have slipped my mind, if so please accept my apologies.

    If you're a fan of 'vim' (Popular variant of the Unix 'vi' editor) and want some syntax highlighting, you can find it here. Too bad the author of the file has a bad attitude about the language :-(

    Another syntax file we already have on the site for Ultraedit.

The Toronto Business Basic Meetup is taking place next week. Wed, Feb 9th @ 7pm @ Stoney's Bar & Grill at Yonge & Sheppard. If you haven't already, please RVSP at the meetup site so I can make sure to let the place know ahead of time in case we have a large group.

    Why might I suspect we'll have a larger than normal group? Well, Mike King and his wife Rosalba will be coming out to join us. Now that he doesn't have his monthly meetings in LA the same week he'll be able to come out more often to the user group.

    For those that haven't come out to a meetup before, it's very informal. Just a group of business basic programmers getting together to hang out. Some of us order dinner, others just order drinks. It's not all shop-talk either as most of the regulars are independants who are stuck in the office and/or at clients all day and don't get a chance to interact with their peers all that often.

    Hope to see you there.

    In follow-up to the announcement last week of Mike King leaving ProvideX, here is the note that George Riviere sent to all of the Master Developers with a bit more detail than what was in the first note. I know that it has helped answer many of my questions so I'm happy to be able to share it here for all of us non-MAS related people.

    Also, if you haven't already, check out Mike's new site at PVXPlus.com for even more information. I'm having lunch with him early next week and should be able to share some more news then.

     A good discussion was had on the mailing list today when Dave raised a question about where to go if netmeeting isn't available, as Microsoft as discontinued support for it as they replace it with some newer products.

    The major response has come back in favour of VNC, and there were opinions on the various versions and distributions available out there. RealVNC is the 'official' one, and they have a limited version that is freely available. If you want the security features, you need to go with the enterprise version (you can get a quote on their site). If you already have a VPN setup to the client, you probably don't need the security features (unless you're paranoid about local sniffers). A strength of RealVNC mentioned was the clipboard integration. As I type this on my Mac, I'm copying URL's from the emails on my PC and pasting them directly here - no fuss, no hassle. My understanding of VNC however is that it's an open standard (thus the proliferation of clients & servers) so the interoperability of each should be compatible back and forth.

    PCAnywhere which in the early 90s was the leader on the PC side seems to have not gotten too many votes. Perhaps it was the price point? A know a large # of people too that still just support off directly connecting to the unix server and anything PC related they just do over the phone. Perhaps this thread will give them the opportunity to explore a few other options. We all know that it can be difficult sometimes getting a user to type in PrintSpaceANineDollarSign. It only takes minutes to setup VNC the first time, and less after that.

    The 'Ask for Assistance' feature of MSN Messenger was mentioned. This can work if the user already has a passport account etc, which many won't have. Also, a number of organizations do not allow instant messaging applications as part of their corporate policy so you could hit resistance using this method. Not to mention having all your clients on your contact list could get disruptive.

    Thought not brought up in the conversation today, I know that a # of clients also have agreements with some of the web & java based providers of these types of services. In this case you pay the 3rd party a support agreement monthly and your staff have accounts on their system which they login to and start a session. The client then connects to the website and connects to your session. The benefit of these types of systems if you eliminate most of the connection/firewall related issues you'll run into occasionally with the others.

    Another products mentioned: Remote Adminstrator (AKA "radmin")
TridiaVNC - Tridia was known in our cirlces years ago for the DoubleView software on unix systems which would allow you to take control of a terminals session and provide support, so they know the business well.
tightVNC
DameWare Mini Remote Control
UltraVNC