Telecommuting/remote options

[FirebirdNC]

With covid an ongoing issue I know some of you might have some experience with the different options out there. One of my coworkers wants to work from home and be able to log in to our accounting software to work remotely. There are a lot of options out there. Does anyone have any favorites? Pros/cons? It would be for one person logging into her computer which is, in turn, networked to our accounting server. Looking for something low cost and secure obviously since it would just be secure access and not like a team of people working from home. It looks like LogMeIn is about $35/month. RemotePC from idrive is $30/year. Chrome remote desktop looks like its free. I would appreciate any advice .

[Deacon]

I don’t have any advice beyond the typical LogMeIn type offerings. There are others, like various flavors of VNC or even RDP, but they can be difficult to set up well (and securely), and exposing RDP to the world can be asking for trouble, with various mitigation optics available depending on your network hardware. RDP would definitely be the easiest, though (and free).

Depending on your network hardware, you could also use something f like OpenVPN to allow her to connect her home computer to the office network, and then you don’t have to generally worry about exposing inbound connections/ports to the wild interwebs. That’s what I do with my old ASUS router so that I can use my phone to remote in to my laptop from anywhere at any time. Enable the VPN, then use VNC or RDP or whatever to connect to whatever internal system at home I need to interact with.

That said, why are you doing any accounting physically on the premises? Why aren’t you using whatever online accounting system? Then she wouldn’t have to connect to the office computer at all.

[raptor9k]

LogMeIn is fairly decent for that type of stuff. As Deacon mentioned, VPN support would be handy, then she could just remote into the machine with terminal services/remote desktop.

If you're using something like quickbooks I think it's pretty painless to switch to their hosted offering. Might be money better spent than trying to setup a VPN or paying for a remote solution.

[auntmousie]

I used GoToMyPC for about a year before my (backwards) (luddite) office upgraded my machine to Win10 (from ruddy Vista) (no, really) and I suddenly became compatible with Chrome Remote Desktop.

I gotta be honest, I liked GTMPC better - but CRD is free, and that's spiff. And I do dig being able to slave my home machine reciprocally to my work machine while I'm there so that I can play wow while "working" use software that isn't installed on my work machine.

And I kinda dig not spending $10/mo to maintain this.