Netop Remote Control 12.2 review

Businesses looking for a wide choice of client connection types will appreciate the options offered by Netop Remote Control. Along with guest and host components, it offers a cloud portal for remotely connecting to users' systems and - if you don't want to rely on a third party to host the support sessions -- you can do it all yourself with the optional Netop WebConnect module.

It's also big on security. Access to hosts can be password-protected, and you can authenticate using Windows login credentials and integrate Netop with Active Directory. Netop also offers an optional Security Server module that both maintains a central log-server database and manages network authentication tasks.

Each remote PC must have a host component installed locally, which worked fine on our Windows desktops. However, this hadn't been updated to support OS X El Capitan at the time ofour tests. Larger deployments can be streamlined with Netop's Pack'n Deploy tool, which sends the host to multiple Windows systems, complete with custom configurations.

All of the Netop action takes place at the guest console, which hasn't changed a great deal in many years, other than a lick of paint. Even so, we found it easy to use, presenting a neat row of tabbed folders for each function. For example, we used the Quick Connect tab to browse the network and pull up a list of systems running the host software.

Connecting to a remote host is a simple double-click manoeuvre, while a dropdown menu provides quick access to functions including remote control, a file-transfer window, text chat and audio or video chat. The Demonstrate mode is also handy. This shows the guest's screen on the host computer, allowing support staff to provide visual cues for a particular task.

The remote management feature is very useful, presenting views of the host's hard disks, direct access to the event viewer and task manager, plus Registry editing. In our tests, we could see running services or shared folders and directly control the host. We could even log out the remote user and restart the machine.

Netop's guest console accurately displays hardware and software inventories, and it correctly identified hardware including CPUs, memory and hard disks on our test systems. It also got all the OS versions right and provided a complete list of software applications, along with their installation dates and version numbers.

We needed to enter a user's password every time we connected to their machine, but this can be streamlined using the guest's Netop phonebook. Each entry in the book contains authentication credentials, encryption options, keyboard and mouse behaviour and more, allowing host connections to be initiated immediately.

The WebConnect 2 portal required the host profiles to be reconfigured with the portal's web address, plus a username and password. It provides a list of available devices, which can each be placed into custom groups. Connecting to the remote host is then just a matter of entering a password.

The hosted service only allows for remote control, meaning the range of support features on offer is basic. We could lock, restart or shut down the host, resize the display to fit, and use the Windows key, but that was all.

Netop Remote Contol is easy to deploy and use. It offers an impressive range of features for the price and is best suited to businesses that want swiftly deployed remote support that's tightly locked down against unauthorised use.

Verdict

Netop Remote Contol is easy to deploy and use. It offers an impressive range of features for the price and is best suited to businesses that want swiftly deployed remote support that's tightly locked down against unauthorised use.

Netop Guest/Host: Windows XP/Server 2003 upwards

OSX upto 10.1

Linux