What's the Best Way to Give Far-Away Virtual Assistants Access to Software I Own?

September 10, 2010 6:55 PM

What's the Best Way to Give Far-Away Virtual Assistants Access to Software on My Computer? ("Best"= most secure, cheapest, simplest, most hassle-free) Hi, I'd like to give access to software that I own to other people, preferably at times that I'm asleep and my computer is off. I'm considering renting a VPS, and installing therein the software I want them to use. Of course, the software I'd be sharing with them would be XP-based... is that a problem, given the fact that VPSs are usually Linux? Is WINE adequate for this? While I am also entertaining the possibility of using a desktopsharing app to just give VAs access to specified folders and apps on my machine, I'd rather install the necessary software on a VPS and have them use that. Any suggestions you can give me, including other and better ways of doing this, would be much appreciated... Thanks. :)
posted by darth_tedious to computers & internet (11 answers total)

What software do you want to give them access to? What's the overall goal?
posted by Wild_Eep at 7:35 PM on September 10, 2010

What kind of software are we talking about? Stuff that needs a window server (GUI stuff, like Office/Photoshop), or command line/server stuff (web/DB servers)?
posted by mkultra at 7:36 PM on September 10, 2010

The software I have in mind is of two kinds, both GUI:

1) simple local apps (for example, copywriting or image editing ware)

2) apps that go online (for example, linkbuilding and sitebuilding apps)

Additionally, I'd like assistants to be able to draw on whatever docs and files I supply in order to use those apps-- so I'd like to make folders available to them also.

The overall goal is to make as many levels of my overall work-- including whatever software would go with those levels-- available to as many assistants as possible, so that I can shift as much as my time as possible to planning, creating, and devising. Or, put more precisely, I want to make as many tools and documents as possible available to others, in a way that's relatively secure, sandboxed, and independent of my supervision.
posted by darth_tedious at 8:46 PM on September 10, 2010

Depending on what OSes you have access to, you might want to consider a Windows Terminal Server (available with Server 2003 and 2008) or possibly creating a VPN into your Windows machine with a dedicated login for your assistant(s).
I'm not very familiar with Amazon's web services, but they might be able to provide what you want without actually letting someone into your machine.
posted by fiercekitten at 10:51 PM on September 10, 2010 [1 favorite]

Have a look at Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offering. Windows Server operating systems are available, and the ElasticFox extension for Firefox makes managing EC2 fairly painless.
posted by flabdablet at 3:44 AM on September 11, 2010

I was going to mention EC2. Does windows fine. But it can be expensive to run an EC2 node all month compared to low-end virtual servers.
posted by delmoi at 8:49 AM on September 11, 2010

Use a service like GoToMyPC ?
posted by pharm at 12:55 PM on September 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

Rackspace Cloud also has Windows VPSes. Looks like ~$60/month to run one full-time. A few cheaper options are listed here and here.

A Windows VPS will usually be more expensive than a Linux VPS. If your apps run well under Wine, that might work, but it will be far more of a headache than setting up an actual Windows instance and using RDP.
posted by whatnotever at 1:51 PM on September 11, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oh wow, this just came out but Amazon just released a thing called micro instances that are low-powered and cheaper then their previous smallest instance type. It only costs 3¢ an hour to run windows (2 cents for Linux) so you'll be able to run a windows server all month under low load.
posted by delmoi at 5:45 AM on September 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Seconding Terminal Services/RDP. There are hacks that allows XP to have multiple users rdp into the machine at the same time. There are also programs that allow this if you are not technically inclined.
posted by dozo at 10:11 AM on September 12, 2010

Thanks all! :)
posted by darth_tedious at 9:20 PM on September 13, 2010