Team Viewer: Unattended Access

I’ve been using Team Viewer for a while now to do remote support sessions on far off computers.  It is really easy to use for that purpose and works out very slick.  Recently I have started working with some of the more advanced options that Team Viewer does, such as Unattended Access and Presentations.  In this blog post I will talk about Unattended Access.

So lets start with what this means.  Typically when you do a remote support session with Team Viewer they have to download the client, run it, tell you their user-id and password before you can connect to them.  What Unattended Access means is that you can setup a PC to always run the client, and set it with a basic computer name and password for others to connect to this PC when no one is there.  If you download and install the full version of Team Viewer there is an option in the settings to setup Unattended Access.  This will allow you to set a system password, which will override the numeric password so it will always be able to connect, even when no one is there.

Now the next step is to setup a user account at Team Viewer for yourself, which can be done from their website.  Once you have this you can then create a Partner List, this will basically allow you to bookmark the computers you setup with unattended access, so when you want to connect you can just pick them from a list and off you go.  You do have to put in the computer and the password when you add it to your Partner List.

Now Team Viewer also has the ability, like other products, to let you access these systems from a web browser, instead of using the Team Viewer client.  All you have to do is go to the Team Viewer website and login.  You will then be able to access your Partner List, allowing you to connect to your systems just as if you had the Team Viewer client installed.  And since it is browser based, you can do this from any computer with an internet connection.  With all that said, and having tried both methods, I can honestly say that the performance is better if you use the local client.  Not that the web browser version was unusable, I could just tell the difference between that and the local client.

So if you are interested in being able to access a computer remotely without anyone having to connect on the other end, you might try setting up a Team Viewer Unattended Access on your system.  There are several other products out there that can do this as well, but my experience has mostly been with Team Viewer and I have been very satisfied with their product, especially since it is free for non-commercial use.