EduVNC:About

From EduVNC

This wiki serves as the homepage and documentation for EduVNC. EduVNC was created by Jeremy Collins from the fine work done on the BSD licensed A-VNC. It also incorporates code from PHPJS. Both projects are licensed under a MIT License which allows other programs to use the code so long as the original writers are given attribution for their works.

Jeremy Collins has worked as an administrator in the educational field for over a decade. When asked why he created EduVNC he said:

I've used some sort of remote desktop tool for systems administration for many years. Both Microsoft's RDP and the widely used VNC have served me well over the last few years, but I always had little problems with each of them. VNC was great when you just needed one server, but getting multiple server to run wasn't very easy. It also doesn't work well with Vista and even the UltraVNC version which claim Vista compatibility have been less that stable.

Microsoft's RDP client is also a good one person remote desktop solution, but it has a major drawback in that you can't take over another user's existing session. This makes it hard to troubleshoot remotely with. Neither worked well in one of the more useful classroom uses for remote desktop viewing: Viewing an instructor's desktop. Yes LCD projects work and we have lots of them, but sometime the detailed view you can get from a VNC like display is needed, especially if your students have difficulty seeing.

When I finally got fed up with trying to get several differently configured instances of VNC working on a single Vista install, I began looking for a better way. I happened across the A-VNC code, try A-VNC and thought it had potential. Although it was a long way from what I wanted in a VNC replacement product it had a good foundation to build upon. After several weeks of work on nights and weekends I was able to produce the first release of EduVNC. My hope is other school administrators will find it as useful as I do.