Re: A marketing question

"Eryk" schrieb:
Ah, OK ...I missed the bit about 'bundles'. So, it is 799 euro rather than 1000 euro for the complete source, correct?

RTC Portal VCL + SDK Basic = 399 EUR

This includes all the source you will ever need to give Host, Viewer and Control your own look and feel. And since the Gateway is more-or-less a general-purpose message dispatcher (login/logout/subscribe/unsubscribe/send/receive messages), you can even add your own functionality, without making a single change to the Gateway code. Only if you wanted the full source code of the Gateway, your total cost would be 799 EUR.

I agree in theory, but in practice it is a big job going through an update with a diff tool and doing a line by line assessment of whether changes/fixes are going to break stuff that we have injected into the codebase.

Don't make changes to third-party components. Report bugs and let the component vendor fix them. If there is a feature you can not add without making changes to the component code, ask for an update to allow you do what you need. This not only helps you avoid going through every update to see how you can integrate your own fixes (again), but also helps the components becoming more stable and useful.

I'm sure there is, but in the end I have to assess whether those differences confer 799 euros (if I am reading correctly this time) of material advantage in respect of our requirements.

Here is a list of some things which are new in RTC Portal 2.0:

1) RTC Host, Viewer and Control work through firewalls and proxy servers by using the HTTP protocol, acting like a Web Browser.

2) RTC Host, Viewer and Control will automatically reconnect and continue where they left off in case of a connection loss. If a connection can not be re-established after several automatic reconnect attempts, the user be logged out and informed about a possible connecion problem. This is particularly useful when sending large files (you don't have to worry anymore if you should lose the connection in the process).

3) Depending on RTC Host settings, Controls and Viewers connected to the same Gateway as the Host will see when the Host is online and will immediately be able to take action (no need to click "refresh" or open up a separate list).

4) RTC SDK (on top of which RTC Portal VCL is built) implements it's own strong encryption and allows you to utilize third-party encryption components (StreamSec Tools or SecureBlackBox) to add SSL/TLS encryption

5) RTC Host has a much better screen capture mechanism than the old remote tools (using a video mirror driver), reducing Host's CPU usage to a minimum, while increasing the screen refresh rate. Compression level and Frame rate can be changed by each Host to get the best performance when working with a specific Gateway.

6) Clipboard is now being automatically and fully synchronized between the Host and Control when you use remote desktop, so there are no speciak "Get/Put Clipboard" buttons needed. You use the clipboard as you would on a local PC. You can send everything but files that way (even images, formatted text and Delphi components).

7) RTC Control and Host can use automatic key mapping (this can be turned on/off by RTC Control), allowing you to seamlessly work with remote PCs keyboard as if it had the same keyboard layout as yours, even though it is completely different. For example, if you have customers all over the World and your keyboard layout is different than theirs, you would have been looking for the right keyboard combo to get special characters like " { \ @ " when using any other remote desktop control app. With RTC Portal, you simply enable Automatic keyboard mapping and let RTC Host and Control do the rest (works with international keyboards also).

8) RTC Host can now be controlled and/or viewed by any number of Controls/Viewers at the same time, without increasing CPU or bandwidth usage. This allows a support person to "call in" an expert if a solution should become more complex. There is no limit to how many people can watch and control the same Host remotely.

9) The new Chat is a lot more sophisticated than the old one. It is a "chat room" rather than a 1-on-1 chat session, which allows multiple support people to discuss customers issues directly in a shared chat session. It uses the new "chat bubbles" technique (can be turned off if not wanted) and Chat History (cal be loaded/saved), which makes it easy to follow the conversation even when multiple users are in the chat.

10) RTC Host and Control have a much better files and folders transfer implementation. Not only that it works through proxies, it is also faster, gives you more useful info (shows curent file/folder and total progress bar, average speed, estimated time to completion), allows you to "push" new files in front of the current files being transferred, does not stop screen refresh (it will be slower, but still work), allows you to cancel the transfer at any time without closing the connection.

11) RTC Host can set set it's own visibility and access levels to a group of users, and ... specify additional access rights for "super users".

12) RTC Host can now limit the screen region which will be visible to remote users (Controls and Viewers), which makes it the ideal choice for making remote presentations to one or Viewers.

If none of these things are interesting to you, I don't see a reason for you to switch.

Best Regards,
Danijel Tkalcec, Team RTC
http://www.realthinclient.com

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