There is a glaring ommission as there is no way to start a remote desktop session via Spark. A simple solution to this (although it would be limited) would be to add a button in Spark that sent a link with the users IP address formatted as such http://192.168.1.1:5800 (I think it’s :5500 for Tight) and would allow the person on the other end to click the link and get a java VNC session in their web browser. Of course this would limit you to being in the same network and having VNC deployed out to your locations already. But it would be a start. There is also a way for Ultra and Tight to be used in reverse so that the request to connect would come from the user and the VNC server recieves the request. Don’t know if anyone has any better input than this or if anyone has made any progress in getting something like this set up. I just think it’s an oversite that would conceptually be simple to solve as the tools to fix this are out there. I’m no programer otherwise I’d fix it myself!
If I’m behind on this and there is a solution, would anyone care to share? It’ doesn’t have to be open source but it would be nice.
Thanks in advance.
Hi Brian:
I agree that built-in screen sharing would be excellent. I actually went down the plugin road a bit, to see if I could get something to work. Since we already have VNC deployed on our local network, it seemed like a good place to start.
Via a plugin, I was able to add a context menu item ‘Request to View Desktop’ to the user menus. From there, it would simply send a text file to the user, which was a 1 line .bat (sitting on the requesters local machine - with IP address pre-configured) triggering the reverse VNC connection to happen. It also checks to see of the the user who makes the request has the port where VNC should be listening tied up. If not, it starts it - then sends the request.
It’s a nice side benifit that the sharing request has to be OK’d by the other user, via accepting and running the .bat file.
It works, when all the pieces are in place. However, there are just a few too many pieces for me to have deployed this particular solution. But it can be done. There’s certainly a few more steps that should be there before the plugin (which is fairly basic, I assure you) could be used to add screensharing effectively.
Let me know if you want it, and I can dig up what I’ve done so far.
Patrick
Yes that would be great! I would love to try it out and see how well it would work.
Alright. I’ve posted it here. Check out the readme file to try to decode my efforts.
I’ll try to follow up tomorrow if you have questions.
SparkShare.zip (31476 Bytes)