Access Your Desktop (and) Software from Anywhere with Autodesk Remote

Forgot to copy that file from your Desktop before you left the office? Need one little dimension/camera view/material definition from that model in the office? These are familiar situations that all of us have faced – the prospect of blowing something that needed to be done versus making that trek back to your desktop (literally) – be it two minutes or two hours.

AdeskRemote from parametric analytics on Vimeo.

Without so much of a brouhaha, Autodesk has introduced a Remote Desktop Utility for its software subscribers. This means that anyone (with a subscription) can access their work (or any desktop for that matter) from anywhere. This also means that you can get to your powerful work desktop from that low-power net-book your kid/parent uses, or from your tablet, or (God forbid) from your phone.

How? (you ask)

Well, it can’t get any simpler…. Just go to Autodesk Exchange Apps store by clicking on the image below, Sign-in with your Autodesk subscription ID, and download the desktop client.

The client works both ways: to access another desktop and to share the current desktop. You don’t have to do anything by way of setup – its all done for you. A note of caution, if your IT infrastructure is locked down, you may have to trouble-shoot a bit. The support page is quite handy to work with if you have trouble in this area. At the moment it looks as though only apple devices are supported for the tablet/phablet/phone form-factor.

Once the clients or apps are installed and running, you are ready to roll… UNBELIEVABLE right? what, no RDP via VPN through that wormhole in an undisclosed location on your screen? that’s right, there’s none (at least in my home setup – The I-pad would not work on my office computers, but I could access one computer from another – that’s a separate conversation with Jame and the dreaded firewall)

I have a few screen-shots below with a video demo in the beginning of this post.

I haven’t had a chance to test it with sketchy internet connections yet but so far, I haven’t seen any lag similar to the kind that you see with Remote Desktops. However like all connected systems, I imagine that sketchy internet would equal sketchy access. I think that this is the greatest utility when it comes to working anywhere (when compared to cloud-based systems).