Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Nader Nafissi, Server and Storage Software Product Manager. Good afternoon. Looks like we had a packed house here today, which is very cool. So today we're going to be talking about Apple Remote Desktop 2. This is brand new. We just introduced it last Monday and we've been working hard on it and it's going to be a great release. And before I start, everybody in their packs, they've got the little ARD software.

Yeah, so try it out. Let us know what you think. Again, we think this is one of the best releases we've done and it's got a lot of great features in it and we'll try to cover some of these features today. So, Apple Remote Desktop, what's it all about? So basically I think this image captures the essence of what the product helps you do. This is one of the many labs that we have.

This happens to be the University of Tokyo iMac lab, but again, there's probably every educational institution has something similar to this. If you own a business, you might not have all your computers in one room, but they're probably scattered across a floor or buildings or across different cities.

And again, as system administrators or IT professionals, you're trying to manage these systems. You need to configure them, you need to provide remote assistance to users, you need to collect information about what exactly the configuration of these computers are. And again, if you only had one iMac, we've made Macintoshes really easy to use, and that's great, but if you've got one or more, especially if they're scattered across various geographical locations, that quickly becomes a very hard job. So that's why we make Apple Remote Desktop, is to really help you get the job done faster, more efficiently, with less resources, etc.

So Apple Remote Desktop 2 is our second generation of this product. We have over 50 new features in Apple Remote Desktop 2 and countless other enhancements. Again, if you use the old product and you start using this new version, everything you do you'll notice, oh, this is new and this is new and this is better. So it's a really great product.

I've been using it now for a couple of months now just with the beta testing and I can't even go back to the old version. This is really a great product and we've taken it out to some customer sites to kind of do some field testing on it. And again, the way this software behaves, especially in larger environments, if you've got hundreds, 500,000 Macs, just the whole interface, the workflow, this product is much better suited to managing.

So at a high level, what this product lets you do is it helps you with software distribution and software could either be operating system updates or just regular application updates. We also have a lot of features that help you with asset management. By asset management, I mean what the configuration of your computers are as well as what software you've installed on there.

It also helps you with remote administration. So again, remotely, in mass, you can target a bunch of computers and perform various tasks on them. And you can also provide remote assistance to your end users as well. There's a lot of screen sharing features. You might have gotten a clue, we've got the big binoculars, that's what that's for. So you can do some screen sharing with your users and help them through their tasks. And last but not least, we also have a lot of features that really help make the product very easy to set up.

And if you're trying to add computers for your management tasks, it's a very easy task. So that's Apple Remote Desktop 2. Our tagline is Desktop Management Made Easy. And hopefully, it's not just us saying that. We actually have a lot of customers that value the product and they're strong supporters. This is a sample quote from one of our education customers.

So what I'm going to do next is just kind of walk through each one of these categories of the product. I'll try to keep the slides to a minimum because I've got Michael Lopp, who's the Center Engine Manager for Apple Remote Desktop, to actually give you some demos because the product really, you know, you could read about it, you could look at the spec sheets, but until you see it in action, you know, that's when it starts clicking for you. So we'll try to do a lot of demos to actually show you how the features work.

So for easy setup, what's new in ARD 2 is we've again reexamined how the workflow works and we have what we call network scanners. And these network scanners assist you in the task of finding out what computers are in your network and adding them to your computer list. The four scanners that we have in ARD 2, one is just a local area network scanner. So whatever computers are in your local area network will detect, will tell you what version of ARD they're running, if they need to be updated or not.

We also have a network address range scanner. So if you want to see what computers are across the street or, you know, in another town, you can also specify a range of IP addresses that will go scanning and will discover computers in that remote location. If you just want to individually add computers, we can also do host lookups either by IP address or DNS names.

And new to this version, we also have the ability to import a list of computers. Whether it's just host names or IP names, you just have a little text file or a spreadsheet, whatever, and you can just drag it into ARD. We'll go resolve it and again, you can add it to your computer list.

The basic way you manage your computers is you would organize them into computer lists and new in this version is you can have any number of computer lists. We don't have any limitations anymore. As well as within each computer list, you can have any number of computers. And again, Michael is going to be showing that to you shortly.

We also have a brand new setup assistant. So again, if you want to configure all these computers as far as the ARD settings go, you can answer a couple of questions and we'll apply all these settings to your computers in mass. And what's very cool about this too is you can actually save that settings in a little package and you can put in your keychain drive, whatever. So as you go along and you get additional computers, you can just apply that package to that new computer and it'll get all the settings that you want for your organization. Amen.

And also new to in ARD2 is with the old version and again in this new version as well, the authentication, the way it worked was you had to have a local account on the client computers and you would assign privileges to it and that's how you would authenticate and add it to your computer list.

But based on a lot of feedback we had from our larger customers that were heavily involved directory services, they used it, they really liked it, they were asking us, can you make ARD be a better player if we have directory services? So what we've done now is for the authentication of the clients, again you can still rely on the local accounts because some accounts or some customers really like that, but now you can also specify directory services group so the authentication and the privileges happen through that.

And last but not least in the easy setup category is we have a new feature called user mode. And this is probably more relevant to folks in the education side of the house. And again, the product is really great for managing computers and in a classroom type setting, teachers like a lot of the features we have in the product.

But the IT folks are typically kind of hesitant to allow a teacher full admin access and the full power of the product. So what we've done with user mode is an administrator now can go off and essentially enable or disable features that they don't want regular users to be using. And when you log into the computer with a standard user account, which is what most teachers or non-IT folks have, they can still launch the application.

But when they try to do the tasks that the administrator didn't want them to do, they'll be grayed out or not highlighted. So with that, thank you. I'm going to invite Michael Lopp, who's again Senior Engine Manager for Desktop Managed Solutions. And he's going to give you a quick demo of the basic user interface of the application and some of the things I just talked about.

Michael Lopp: Good afternoon. So my boss asked me -- he came by before this and said, "What are you going to demo?" I told him, "I'm demoing everything. I want to show you everything in this product right now." And we've got a set of hardware here that we're actually going to be using to actually show you the features of the product. So I call this an aggressive demo because we've got a lot to do.

So, App and Remote Desktop. How many out there have used one, two? Ah, okay. What do you think of the new interface? You like it? A round of applause. It's a very familiar interface probably because it's very similar to iTunes. We've got on the left, we have a list of computer lists.

We've created a couple sample ones here to start it off. Then we have scanners, the ability to actually find machines on the network. And then we have saved tasks. Saved tasks is a whole new metaphor that we've put into this product. It's sort of the concept of a task that we had in the prior product, but it was something that you can actually save information with. So a task is all the tasks that I want to do and then all the computers I want associated with, and then scheduling as well.

So tasks are something that are reusable things that you're going to want to have a lot of time. So we give the ability to save those whether they're scheduled or not. So I've created a WWDC lock task here. I'm going to show you all this in a second. Over here what you're seeing on the right is just a standard computer list. These are the machines that we're currently seeing in the system.

These are the labs machines over here, what the application is that they're currently in, who the current user is, whether it's available. What VNC is. We'll explain that in a second. And then the bottom is the task history. These are all the tasks that I've currently executed against these machines. You can see I've been very successful in running all these tasks.

So this is again any task that you've executed, whether you've executed explicitly or scheduled, it shows up down here. So this is your console. This is where you're going to be spending your time managing your machines. So let's talk about a task really quickly and show you that this is not actually just a fake setup. It's real.

So we'll go ahead and create a scanner. These are the machines that are currently on the network, on a private network here. Go ahead and we're going to select these machines that I want to create a list from. Latecomers. Maybe not. And we're going to create a new list.

As Nader said, computer lists are all over the system. You can create them from just about anywhere. We'll go ahead and create this list with these machines. I'm going to call it WWDC Live. Okay. I've already authenticated to them, but if I hadn't authenticated, you'd see an access authentication dialog. We provide the admin name and the password. So let's go ahead and select these machines and do our first task. I'm going to lock the screens because it's fun. Go ahead and type locked.

Now, this is a task window that you're going to see in all of the other tasks. They're very similar. It captures the information that's relevant to the task, like lock screen, copy items, all the other tasks. But also, you're just going to see the schedule dialog. So if I want to schedule this one repeating or at a certain time, I can do that.

Also, if I want to target it against a certain set of machines, I can do that from this window. These buttons are in every single task that you have. I'm just going to go ahead and lock this, show you what it looks like. It locked. The power. That's great.

Anyway, so let's let our users back in. We'll go ahead and unlock those screens. And we'll talk about this other window here. So what happened is when the task was running, what you saw was the status was updating. What you're seeing here is, this is sort of a detailed task progress view.

These are all the machines that I executed the task on. And you can see the status. The status varies depending on which task you're using. But the idea here is you can get a little more detailed status. If you don't want this window popping up every task that you're running, you can just turn it off in preferences.

So that's kind of a high level overview of the interface. We've created a scanner. Let me show you one other type of scanner that we have. Maybe you've got an Excel document or some other document that you have a list of IP addresses in. The other scanner that we have that we're really fond of is the file import one.

What this is, actually I've already put it in there. What this is, what we do is we allow you just to randomly, any document, you can just drop in here. As long as it has IP addresses, Excel document, whatever you wanna use, you can just pull it in here. We'll just drag it in.

And rescan it. And there you go. You can use this list live to actually, if you have something, if you have an Excel document or something like that, if you want to edit it, you just rescan it and it'll show back up with your edited documents, your edited computer list in there as well. So.

So client settings, since we're talking about easy setup, now that we've got our admins, now that we've authenticated them, now that we've got a list, let's go ahead and actually do something to these machines. What I'm going to do is I'm going to actually set some client settings. This is basically setting preferences against these clients.

So I'll actually want to do something. So you're going to see this sort of assistant here. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to specify what properties, what preferences that I want to be associated with all of these clients. I'm going to kind of blaze through this. So I'm going to leave the startup preference.

I'm going to leave it enabled. I'm going to leave the menu extra up on the top of the screen. I'm not going to create any users right now because that would take a little time. But I could create new users at this point. I could, if I want to do directory authorization, I have the ability to set that in here.

If I want to specify privileges for the local users, I can do that as well. I can do a feature that we're actually not going to demo. We can set the request permission. This is a guest access feature. So again, this is for the educational setup. If you want to say, listen, I occasionally want help.

But I don't want this admin to have access. You can have it so you can check it. And then when someone, your admin, says, well, you're in trouble. I need to help you. You actually get prompted and say, yes, no, you can observe my screen. No, you can't. So guest access is a really popular feature.

As you probably heard already, we've rewritten our screen sharing in VNC. VNC is the Virtual Network Computer Protocol. We've done a clean room implementation so that you can use any VNC viewer with Apple Remote Desktop as well. We'll show that in a second when we actually observe and control a PC as well as a Mac.

And just first, we're actually doing something in this client setup task demo. We'll go ahead and set that right there. Okay, task window again. Do you want to save it? Do you want to run it? Do you want to schedule it? We're just going to run it. Takes a second to get going.

You'll see this one is a little bit more, got a little more data. You can, if you've got a really long task, a big report or something, this is great. It gives you a little progress, tells you what each computer is doing as it's installing the package, applying the settings, restarting everything.

And then it's done. More success. Knock on wood. All right. So, again, this is just a little bit of the stuff that you can do with setting up a client. I encourage you to take a look at the product and, Nader, that's it for Easy Setup. Thank you.

And again, this whole software distribution is a task that, just like any other task, you can schedule it, you can save it, so it inherits all the functionality that is the whole task in Apple Remote Desktop 2. So with that, I'm going to ask Michael to come up and do a couple of demos for you. Michael Kahn: Me again. All right. So we talked about easy setup.

We're going to do software distribution now. As Nader said, there's a lot of ways to get bits down in a machine via ARD. Maybe you have a package that you want to copy. Maybe you have some other way. There's a lot of different ways. I'm going to show you guys a couple of ways we can do stuff. A feature that we put into 1.2 was the install package feature.

And it's still there. It's got all the new task work that we put into the product. I'm just going to go ahead and grab a package. It's a small package. It's going to go ahead and it's going to close that. We'll go ahead and install it to these eight machines.

Again, what you're going to see, there's task progress chugging away. Go ahead, copies it down, and it goes and just invokes the installer on the client machines. Gives me some information about what's going on. All done. Success. So that's installing a package. That was pretty quick. But what other packages do you have? Lots of them.

They're always going to need -- this is a really easy way to push these packages out to lots of clients. Again, we have eight machines here. This is going to work for 50. This is going to work for 100. So it's a real big time saver. Okay. So let's do -- let's say we don't want to do a package. Another way that people like to copy stuff around is to copy items.

This is similar in install package in that it's copying a set of bits over to the machine. But what we're doing here is we're just copying files or files. And what we're going to do -- what we do is give the ability to copy to the same relative location or a bunch of other locations as well.

Application folders, current user of the logit. And then we're going to do a little bit of the -- of the login machines, desktop folder, home directory, whatever you want to do here. The other thing we'll do -- and I'm going to show this to you a little bit later -- is you can actually invoke whatever the document or thing that you're copying is after it's done. So you can actually say -- copy a Word document, have Word come up as well. So I'm just going to pull for -- let's pull a new lock screen picture down here.

We're going to put this into the preferences folder and we're going to copy it. Okay, copied. Success again. When is something going to go wrong? All right. So just to show you what happened, let's go ahead and actually use task progress here for a second. Task history, sorry. So lock screen, this is a task we ran a while ago.

Just to show you what you can do with this task history window, let's go ahead and click on this guy here. Yep, that's right. Everything worked pretty well. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this task. What I just did here, I said, listen, this task is done, but I want to duplicate it. I want to do the same thing to it. So lock again. Go ahead and close this and lock the screen.

Copy down a different image, lock screen now to use that and we also showed off reusing a task. Down here is a lot of information in task history. It's a lot of stuff that you're going to want to use again and again. Those are a couple quick ways to get bits down to the computer.

Copy items, we have the general concept of soft distribution, but you can also use it to push out a lot of configuration files. With Mac OS X, a lot of the applications are just driven by configuration files. So by just the mere fact of copying out a plist to the right directory, you can pretty much reconfigure a bunch of applications on the remote computers.

Or what we also do is a lot of the actual services that are out there, like the printing services, you can just push out, for instance, the CUPSD config files out to the client computers and you can enable computers or disable computers for computers. So again, a really powerful feature of the product.

So the next category is asset management. And again, imagine, if you will, you've got a sea of computers out there and your boss told you, you know, Tiger's coming out and I need to understand, you know, are we ready for it? Or how much budget should I allocate? For memory or, you know, which computers do I need to retire and get new computers? And again, imagine, if you will, you had to go to each computer and, you know, go up, bring up system profiler and, you know, jot down what the various configuration things are and put it into a spreadsheet.

So we can kind of cut through all that stuff with App Remote Desktop and just those same computer lists that you use for distributing software, you can select those computer lists and you can perform any number of software or hardware reports on these computers. And we can give you, you know, direct from the source information on what the configuration of those computers are, again, both from a hardware and software perspective.

So the reporting functionality on Apple Remote Desktop again has been totally overhauled. It's a lot more comprehensive now. We've added seven new different hardware report types. The amount of information we're collecting now is orders of magnitudes larger than the old version. Just to give you an example, ARD 1.2, its system information report collected maybe at most 30 attributes. Our new system overview report, which is the replacement of that old report, now gives you over 100. And collectively, there's over 200 different attributes. And if you want the full list, you can go to the website because I don't have it all memorized.

So again, a lot more flexibility in the way you report as well. What we're doing now is we're actually caching this information. We have a built-in SQL database in the product. So as we collect this information, we'll store it in our SQL database. And if you know that the configuration hasn't changed, you can save yourself the time of actually going out and touching the client.

You can just talk to the local database. Or you can force a refresh of that data as well. So a lot more flexibility. And again, reporting is a task just like all the other things. The other tasks we had, so you can schedule these reports to happen on a given frequency or at a future date as well.

So this is a list of all the reports that we have. And again, brand new in this new version are like PCI card reports. Or one of my favorites is the memory report now because in the past we could report to you how much memory you had. But again, if you're trying to plan out your memory purchases, you need to know if a computer has 256 megs, is that two 128 meg sticks or is that just one 256 meg stick? So we can give you that information now. So again, very detailed level of information. The storage reports, again, lots of information about your hard drives. So again, encourage you guys to check it out.

So we've also added a more kind of what I call an advanced reporting system. So because what we're seeing out there is notebook computers are increasingly becoming more popular. And I think in education, for instance, all these one-to-one initiatives that we have, it's changed the mix now. So I think roughly 50% of the computers that we sell into education are notebooks. And one of the challenges we had with the old version of the product was that, again, notebook by definition means somebody could be, you know, have the lid down. It could be asleep or they could have taken it home.

And so it's not on your network. So how do you figure out what the configuration of that notebook computer is? So to address this need, we have a new model for doing reporting. And the way it works basically is you dedicate a machine on your network that you always know is going to be up and running because the admin computers could follow the admin. You know, he or she might take it home. It's not always going to be on the network, but you can designate a computer. An XServe would be an excellent way to do that.

So you would have a separate license for that XServe or your server that you've dedicated for this task. And then what you can do is you can set the client settings. So there's a menu option, Apple Remote Desktop 2, where you can specify the client reporting policies as to how often it should report its information. So you can configure that again centrally.

You don't have to go touching every computer. You can do that from the ARD console. And then what you do is on the admin side, you specify there's a preference setting that you can have the admin talk to the XServe's database as opposed to looking at its own local database. So essentially now you get a complete loop here where the clients are sending their information up to the XServe. And the admin, when they're looking at information about all the client computers, they're looking at the XServe as well now.

So if the admin is offline, the clients have a source to report their information to. And if the clients are offline, the admin can still look at the last known state. So again, we think this is a great solution for all those notebooks out there that you want to still keep track of.

Reporting. So what we've done so far is we've pushed a lot of bits out. Now we want to get those bits back. We want to know what kind of deployment that we have. So we're going to run through a couple of reports right now. What I'm first going to do is just quickly talk about this kind of designated offline reporting collector that Nader just mentioned.

What you look at when you go into preferences here, what you can do is, this is my admin machine. You can actually specify a different machine that you could actually pull the data from. So the other part you'd have to do after that if you set this is actually go to your client settings, manage those, and you set the reporting policy. Again, a task, schedulable, configurable, whatever you want to do.

You can tell them how often, all you clients out there, how often should I be blasting my data up to this other machine. So this is again, as Nader said, this is a great thing for mobile computing when you don't know whether the network is there or not. So reports, current application, still locked. Let's unlock that.

Unlock. Success again. All right. So first, let's just go do one of the more popular reports, system overview. What you're seeing here is all the different data that I can collect for this. I'm not going to go into all the details. Go ahead and get this report. All right. That was pretty fast.

So let's talk about what's going on there really quick. If you're familiar with 1.2, the reports kind of were real time. What you saw there was almost instantaneous response. The reason is it was cached. I was pulling it from cached information. So it's nice and speedy. If I was doing it the first time, it would take a little bit longer because all the clients would be basically building up their caches the first time.

So the first time you do this, you go, "Wow, it's not as fast as Michael's demo." That's what's going on. Okay. So the memory report, which people really like. So it's very similar. You can specify slide identifiers, module size, all the detailed information that you want. Go ahead.

Pretty gosh darn fast again. So let's go ahead and take a quick look at this. There's all the detail that you need. It's a very, very comprehensive memory port. While we're here, I just want to point out we also have the ability to print this information. If you want to export it, all the reports have the ability to export all this information as well. All right.

Okay, so let's get a little, just a little bit more here. Let's try another report. Let's do a software version. Hypothetical situation. New version of Safari is out and I want to know who's got it and who doesn't. So I'm going to go ahead. These are all the actual applications that I have on my admin machine. I'm saying, okay, where's Safari? Go find Safari here. I'm going to go ahead and say, okay, compare this, the version that I have here to all those machines out there.

Speedy and fast. All right. So, as it turns out, since these are all cloned from a net install server, they all have the same version. But hypothetically, work with me for a second here. Remember what we said earlier about computer lists. They're everywhere in the system. So let's say these first five machines that I have here have an odd version of Safari.

It's a version I don't know. What we did at the very beginning of this demo is we created a computer list. A computer list is really a simple thing. It's just a list of computers. But what I've done here in the software version report is I've got some information.

And the information is this is what version Safari is on. And these five machines have something I want to follow up on. But I'm not going to do it right now because I've got a lot of people here and I've got other things to do. So I'm going to go ahead and create a list here again. What it did was it took the main window and it created a list. It said, okay, great, from those machines. And these are old Safari.

Huh? I made a little note to myself and I can go back later and I can actually take a look at that. I've got my machines, right? These lists are very powerful. You'll find yourself as you start to use ARD a lot, you'll just be dumping things in there all the time. It's kind of like a post-it note for yourself.

All right. So, That's about it. Those are all the ones I wanted to show. Nader? Nadir Nafi: Okay. Thank you. And so we actually have another session at this year's WWC. It's Friday at 3:00, I believe, and it's in North Beach. And we've got three superstars, Tony Graham, Steve Heyman and Mike Bombic that are going to be talking about how you can extend some of the features we have in ARD.

As I mentioned, all our reporting now is in SQL database. So Mike and Tony are going to be showing you some applications they built right on top interacting with the SQL database. And just as an example of what you guys can do too with your data as you start using this product. So I just want to plug that session there as well.

All right, so the next category is remote administration. And again, ARD has a ton of products or excuse me, features that help you remotely administer. And we're trying to figure out how the best way we can capture this. And so we had our graphic arts person take a little remote control and put those little commands on instead of the numerical buttons.

But that's essentially how ARD works is essentially you have this all-powerful remote control that just by clicking on a couple of buttons, you can influence a lot of computers. And you've already seen some of the things that Michael's done by locking screens by just a couple of clicks. These are very powerful. And again, as you're doing your day-to-day duties, you might have a need to remotely restart all the computers or put computers to sleep or empty the trash files. So this is a great capability the product has.

And so this is a complete list of all the different admin commands that you can perform on the computers. And again, you can select one or more. These are all tasks in the ARD2 nomenclature that we have now. So these can all be scheduled. They could be all saved. And so it just adds an additional dimension of power to these management verbs.

And one new feature that we've added here is the send Unix command. And this is my favorite command. And I think as more and more people start using it, it's going to grow even more popular. And again, to plug the Friday session, Steve Heyman, who's like the wizard of Unix scripting and stuff, he's actually going to use this to help you build your own little software update server. So I know we have one coming on Tiger Server, but you could use ARD today to kind of whip up something yourself. So be sure to catch that.

But what the send Unix command does is it lets you type in either just a one-line command or a whole sequence of commands. And it will go off and dispatch it and have all your client computers simultaneously execute that command. And the results are displayed back on the console. And again, if they're successful, they're successful. If there's any failures or errors, you would see that.

What we've also done, again, Mac OS X has a ton of command line utilities, but what we've done to even further that is there are two command line utilities that we're including with the ARD software. One is called Network Setup and the other one is called System Setup. And you might recognize those names because those are actually command line utilities that Mac OS X server started including with Panther.

And these two command line utilities essentially can set the system preferences from a command line for your network, for energy saver, as well as date and time. So, again, being able to remotely set essentially the time zone for all your computers, I think that's just really, really powerful. And again, all these Unix commands can be set up. scheduled.

So just to give you a sense of how powerful these commands are, just these two commands, never mind all the other command line tools we have in the Unix space. So these are all the different options you can give to network setup, right? So there's this, and then there's that, and this, and that, and a little bit of that. So that was network setup. Should I go back? Did everybody catch that? And this is system setup. A little bit less powerful, but still pretty good. So I'm going to ask Michael again to come up and show us some of these remote admin commands.

Send Unix is cool. It's really cool. I'm going to show it to you in a second, but maybe a good way to explain it is to take a look at all the things that ARD currently does. There's a lot of tasks there. I'm not going to go over all of these, but the point is with Send Unix is when you're stuck with these, if there's something that ARD doesn't do, Send Unix probably does. It's got a lot of flexibility available to it.

What we are talking about is remote administration. The first thing I want to do is I'm actually going to show, I'm going to start using these machines a little bit more, a little more visual, and we're getting into probably what everyone wants to see, which is the multi-observe, which is always a very demo-able feature.

We'll go ahead and we're going to do an open application here. Open application, again, we're getting into more things that are interactive with the machine. It gives you the ability to just open an application on all the machines. You could do this with Send Unix if you wanted to. So we'll go ahead and just open up Address Book.

There you go. More success. So, address book's open. Now what we want to do is we want to close the application. Let's go ahead and select the close application command. There is no. So what were they thinking, guys? So what there is, is there's send unix. Okay? So what we have here is we're going to go ahead and use a command called kill all. Kill all goes and says any process with this name, we're going to kill it. So kill all address book. Go ahead and send it. It's gone.

I have no idea what you guys are going to do with this command, but I'm excited because it's really cool. So let's do another one. We'll go ahead and use one of the network setup commands. Let's say we want to get the Mac address from these machines. We'll go ahead and do a network setup.

Get Mac address. Oh, right, on collaborative demo. Get Mac address, EN0. Is that right? Okay, let's try this. Okay, we'll go ahead. Oh, command not recognized. He typed it wrong. We've got to do it again. Network setup.

I can type, I can type. All right. So you can also just do get info on the machine.

I thought I'd make it hard because I'm an engineer. All right. So in preparation for the next set, I'm actually going to do one other thing, which is another powerful-- another powerful feature kind of akin to SendUnix. What we're going to do is we're going to do a copy item. What I'm going to copy down is I'm going to copy down an Apple script. And what the Apple script is going to do is it's going to start doing things to this machine. It's going to be opening Safari. It's basically going to be simulating user activity.

But it doesn't matter what Apple script you're going to write. You can actually do it-- you can use the copy items to go ahead and copy it and execute it. So we'll go ahead and we're going to go and copy-- why am I doing this? We can just do this. We're going to open up our ARD assets folder. And then we're going to copy the script.

We're going to put it in the home directory. And we're going to go ahead and open it. And what you're going to see here is it's telling me it's already there. So it's saying, wait, wait, wait. You want to blow it away? Of course I do. All right. So there it goes.

Machine started going. Again, it's-- this is for-- I'll show you for our multi-observed demo in a second. But the point is that any Apple script you want to copy down, you can do it the same way just like send Unix. So that's it for remote administration. Nathan? NATHAN CURTIS: Thank you. See, I knew Michael was going to jinx this by-- Keep saying success, success. I knew it was going to fail sooner or later, but that's actually cool. You can actually see the tasks do fail every now and then.

All right, so we, last but not least is remote assistance. And again, this is probably the feature set that most people might identify the product with, but we just wanted to show you that there's so much more to this product than just the screen sharing. But the screen sharing, nevertheless, is very cool because that's probably the most visual part of it.

As Michael said, we've adopted the VNC protocol for this new version. Mac OS X, it's all about open standards, so whenever there's a standard or open source project that we can use which adds value, we will do that. So we've adopted VNC and we use VNC for our screen sharing.

Sample scenario is, again, maybe in a training classroom, whether it's corporate or in education, you want to keep an eye on what students are doing. Again, the computer list will show you what Apple Remote Desktop is doing. So we've adopted the VNC protocol for this new version. And again, this is probably the most visual part of it.

So for remote assistance, as we said, we've adopted the VNC protocol. We've actually enhanced it because, I mean, the VNC is a great protocol and solution, but I think there's two things that people typically associate with it. One is that it's slow, and I think Michael will just demo that, so we'll put that to rest based on some of the optimizations we've done. And the other thing is security.

VNC, as it natively operates, is somewhat insecure in the sense that it transmits passwords in clear text when you're trying to authenticate against a client, and that's a no-no, right? So what we've done there is we actually are using the ARD communications channel to provide you with a secure way to authenticate against those remote computers.

As well, any control events, your typing or any mouse points, all that is encrypted. And we've also implemented using AES 120-bit encryption as well, which, again, is something VNC out of the box doesn't do. You have to set up SSH tunnels and all that kind of stuff, so we've made that easy for you as well.

So that's the VNC and you can individually take control of systems, you can observe them. Because we're using the VNC protocol now, if you happen to have VNC service software running on a PC, running Windows or Linux or you have a Solaris box that's got VNC on it, now you can control or observe that computer straight from the ARD console as well.

And similarly now because we have the VNC server software built into the clients of ARD, if you have it enabled for outside access, if you have a VNC viewer installed in the PC, you can now control a Mac. So this is one of the little byproducts we got from adopting an open standard. So far the reception has been really good. One of the unique things that ARD does is it lets you view multiple screens simultaneously.

With the old version, it was fixed at only four screens at a time and the size was also fixed as well. So if you wanted to see bigger versions of it or smaller versions of it, you really couldn't. So again, Michael will show this to you shortly, but our new multi-observe window is ultimately more dynamic and flexible, allowing you to see up to 50 screens at a time. We only have eight computers here, but if you actually go back to your company's organizations, you'll be able to try it out for yourself.

And really what this is very useful for is just again providing end user assistance. So in a help desk type setting, instead of waving your hands over the phone saying, "No, move your mouse this way, move your mouse that way," you can remotely control that screen and show the user how it's being done. Or better yet, you can actually send your screen, so you can share your screen to one or more Mac computers out there so they can follow along and see exactly what you're doing. So again, this is very popular in education or even in a corporate training lab.

And we also have some text messaging features as part of the product as well. So you can send out broadcast text messages to all your users. And we also have a one-to-one computer-to-computer text chat. So I get this question a lot, you know, why do you still have this? There's iChat.

Well, our computer-to-computer text chat doesn't require any accounts and it's strictly computer-to-computer. So it's still pretty handy. You don't have to worry about whether iChat's installed or is working. And actually, a lot of places, they turn off iChat because they don't want people going outside of their, you know, their corporate firewalls and whatnot. So again, this is a nice way that you can still be able to do the chatting with end users.

So I'm going to ask Michael to come back and show you all the cool stuff. All the cool stuff. If you want to see 50 machines being observed, come to my demo, 9:00 AM on Thursday. We're going to do it there. Right now, we're going to do it with nine machines. OK, so multi-observe. As Nader said, this is what you're all probably used to with ARD. Four machines.

That's it. Ta-da! That's all. Let's go a little bit bigger. All right. Here we are. Eight machines sitting here going ahead. What do you want to do to these? You want to make them bigger? You want to make them smaller? You don't want eight machines, you want less. Okay, that's great. You want to see the next ones? Go ahead.

Yeah, we had to do it. What you're seeing here is the timer is actually going, right now I'd actually click there. What we have here is this timer, and I'll talk about each of these controls. It's going rather fast. What we're going to see is the timer, if you just wanna look at a lot of machines, and you want to go ahead and cycle through them, you can set the adjusted time there.

You can adjust the amount of machines there. So as Nader said, we can go up to 50, and that's a pretty cool demo. You can adjust the time, you can actually just turn it off completely. And what you're seeing here in the last one is a quality codec. What we're doing here is we're looking at it in thousands. We can also go up to millions, which is a bandwidth hog.

You can go down to a gray scale, or you can even go down to something that looks like an old version of the OS. So the idea here is that if you're in a bandwidth constrained situation, you wanna use a little less bandwidth, you wanna go down to gray scale. Uses a lot less bandwidth for this sort of things. We'll go back up to thousands.

Okay, so the other thing that's much more improved than 1.2 is the ability to, it's non-modal. If you wanna, just go, I wanna get this guy over here, make him small, and then I wanna go ahead and observe this guy here. He's pretty big, he's having some problems there. Oh, I want this guy too. Okay, oops, missed it.

All right, it's already open. It's doing the right thing. Go ahead and open up another one. How many of these do you wanna open? Just go ahead, it's very flexible. You can have as many of these open as you want. And what we're looking at right now is we're looking at observe.

The other thing you can do, ooh, the other thing before this is remember, this is also a computer list. Computer list everywhere. Let's go ahead and lock the screen from here. Again, let's do it. All the, there you go. Oh, someone's asleep. Someone's not happy. Something had to break. So there you go ahead, and we can go ahead and unlock it, and then we'll go ahead and unlock those again.

I'm going to come back. So the other thing is you can actually control these machines. You can't multi-control because that would be very hard so far, maybe. And then so we'll go ahead and bring in an observe window. I can't really do anything to this window right now.

But if you go ahead and you click on control, you've got control. Let's go ahead and move it around, drag it about. The other things we have up here, I've also got the script running so I'm kind of fighting with it. The other thing we have in here is the ability to share the mouse control with the cursor.

I mean the cursor with the user. So right now I'm sharing it but if I click it off, if someone's at the machine, they can no longer access it. The other thing that we can do in here is this is kind of big so let's do this and make it a little smaller for us. But now I want to move around a little bit so we got panning mode as well. Go ahead and move it all around and do what you need to do there.

So different screen resolutions, however you want to do it. It's a very, very flexible part of the system. Part of the application. And again, you have the codec change if you need it here as well. The last one is if you want to take a screenshot, just go ahead and click it, throw it on the desktop, give it a name. So if you want to grab something as well, you can do it from So that's multi-observe. The other part-- thank you.

going on here? Okay anyway. Unlock that. Yeah, yeah yeah. Okay got it. Okay. So let's go ahead and get rid of this. So the other side of multi-observe is actually send screen. Now the send screen is for more of the institutional environment. When I--I've got something on this screen that I want you guys to see when I don't have this big huge projector behind me. So what send screen is it actually sends the screens down to all the machines.

So what we're going to go ahead and do is we're going to go ahead and select a task, send screen, quickly on this screen. Right now what I'm going to do is I'm going to send the screen on this machine. What you'll see is I can share another screen as well.

What I can do with ARD is I can actually broker an agreement and say, "You, this screen, share to all these other screens." So you can actually set that up if you've got some sort of complex setup that you want to do. But we're just going to use the admin one right now. You go ahead There you go. Send screen. You're up.

Obviously, if you have multiple going on, you can sit here and stop them. You'll probably notice that task progress right now is still going. Why is it going? It's going because the send screen task is still going, right? This is confusing some people. So go ahead and stop it, and there you're done. What everyone else was probably wondering about is it's VNC, right? So there's other computers you can look at. Let's go ahead and take a look at this one here.

Thank you. I'm going to tell me land. Anyway. No. It's... So... So we have an XP machine here as well. We're running the VNC server on it. And we have control over everything else. So if you have PCs, if you have Licks, desktops, go ahead and use it.

You'll see it's the same control. You don't have all the other tasks against it. It's just the control and multi-observe. And just to show you, if you can go ahead and click that machine there a little bit slower, you can go ahead and see it's just like any other machine that you have, right? So the assets, you have PCs out there, obviously.

Your asset, you need to get to those, you now have the ability to do that via this console. We think that's a big win for this application. And with that, I think that's all we're going to demo. We're just going to go ahead and restart all the machines with our last task. We'll go ahead and manage and restart them.

And that's it. So as we're restarting, I wanted to plug another session that we have. It's desktop management technologies. They are cranky about something not being saved. It's on Thursday at 9 a.m. We're going to have a little bit more ARD demo with a little more cowbell in it. We're going to have mobile home directories, software update server. If you're interested in managing desktops, 9 a.m. in Russian Hill, we'll be going over that.

And that's all I got. Nader? Thanks. So that's our new screen sharing. And again, it was implicit. Michael didn't really highlight it, but I think the performance is very good too. I mean, as those screens were updated, you could see that in the multi-observe. And again, that's something we didn't have with the old product. At least it wasn't as fast.

So there you go, Apple Remote Desktop, desktop management easy. And I know everybody in the room here got a copy, but just when you go back home and you want to tell your friends and relatives and colleagues that they should buy a copy as well, that's our pricing model. We license it per admin.

So every administrator needs to have their own copy. And we have a small office, home office version of this, which is called a 10 client version. With that version, your computer list, that master computer list can only have 10 computers. You try to add 11 computers, we're not going to let you do it.

So by and large, most of our larger customers get the unlimited client version. You can add as many computers as you want, create as many computer lists as you want. And so for additional information, you can contact me. Skip Levins is also maybe someone in the room here. He's our technology manager. And if you're a developer, you can also contact him.

This is a link to all our documentation. Again, you have the documentation in your CDs, but if you want to go, you can go visit our website. I should also plug the admin guide for ARD2. The old admin guide used to be like 30 pages. It was a little handbook, essentially. The new version is over 100 pages. So again, hats off to our docs person for doing a great job on the new ARD2 admin guide.