Teamviewer: an online screen sharing and remote assistance software

What is Screen sharing and remote assistance?
Screen Sharing
One can share the content of his/her computer to the other person using an application. Other person can see the same content whatever the first person wish to share either whole computer or a part of it. Like Browsers only or media players only etc.

Remote Assistance
When you wish to show your computer screen to others either in Local Area Network or through internet for various reasons, you need screen sharing application. If it is for the purpose to troubleshoot any computer related issues or file sharing or to help the other person sitting at far distance (connected through internet), we term it Remote Assistance

What is TeamViewer?
TeamViewer is an online screen sharing and remote assistance application which was first released in 2005 by a German Company GmbH.
It was voted 5 out of 5 by C|Net and 4.5 out of 5 by PCMag and currently it’s in #1 rank under Remote Assistance Application at download.com
It is free to use for personal use but you need to pay some extra bucks to make it professionally. Rates are different for different purpose like business or corporate. You can do video chatting through it too! One can share files using drag and drop functionality or you can develop your own secured private network (VPN).

It supports more than 30 languages and is available in all Operating systems i.e.

• All Windows Platforms
• Linux and other x86 rpm based devices (you may need to use wine)
• Mac
• Andoid
• iOS

Then, it’s a perfect solution for all of your ideas. Enjoy it!

Why Teamviewer?
If you want to

• share your system online for troubleshooting of your system or
• want to demonstrate through presentation (ppt) to your client/students or
• want to have an online meeting for any coaching classes or
• want to have serious discussion online for a project with the team members

Features of TeamViewer (Advantages and Disadvantages)

Pros

• It’s easy to use even for non-technical people
• It’s free for personal use
• You can do video chat too!
• You can troubleshoot others system while sharing the screen (through internet connection)
• It’s easy to use file transfer through drag and drop functionality (from version 7)
• One can remotely access through smart phones
• It is very easy to install and fast to connect to other systems.
• You can customize the whole setting according to your convenience and it’s easy to do that

• V7.x can connect to lower versions if he needs to access lower version TeamViewer based system  but vice-versa doesn’t work
• File sharing and VPN connection is still little complex for common man

 

• Windows: v7.0.12979 (3.4 MB)  added on 19th March, 2012
• Linux:  v7.0.9348 (17.2 MB) added on 19th March, 2012
• Android: v7.0.335 (1.7 MB) updated on 13th March, 2012
• iOS: v7.0.9413 (19.5 MB) added on 7th February, 2012
• Mac: v7.0.11023 (25.5 MB) on March, 2012

Official website: http://www.teamviewer.com/
Download Link: http://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/index.aspx

How to use it and how it works?
Everything from installing the software to the final setup has been described in this video which uses the slides too posted at slideshare.

How this Meeting feature works here?
To start an online meeting the presenter gives the Meeting ID to their participants. They can join the meeting by using the TeamViewer full version or by logging on to http://go.teamviewer.com/  and enter the Meeting ID.
It is also possible to schedule a meeting in advance.

How much secured this Teamviewer is?
TeamViewer uses RSA private/public key exchange (1024-bit) and AES (256-bit) session encoding.
In the default configuration, TeamViewer uses one of the servers of teamviewer.com to start the connection and then do routing of traffic between the local client and the remote host machine. However in 70% of the cases after the handshake a direct connection via UDP or TCP is established. UDP connection makes it much faster.

Here is the presentation for it on Slideshare: