VPN for the rest of us

Today, more and more employers and business owners realize the benefits that working from home or from a remote location can have for their company and employees. The key challenge is often determining how to set things up in order to do this reliably and securely

ShareTool is a smart, easy, and highly secure utilityToday, more and more employers and business owners realize the benefits that working from home or from a remote location can have for their company and employees. The key challenge is often determining how to set things up in order to do this reliably, securely, and in a way that ensures the most seamless transition from office to home/remote location. Traditional habits include the most popular habit of setting up a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

As defined by Wikipedia, a virtual private network (VPN) is a network that uses a public telecommunication infrastructure, such as the Internet, to provide remote offices or individual users with secure access to their organization’s network. It aims to avoid an expensive system of owned or leased lines that can be used by only one organization. The goal of a VPN is to provide the organization with the same secure capabilities but at a much lower cost. It encapsulates data transfers between two or more networked devices not on the same private network so as to keep the transferred data private from other devices on one or more intervening local or wide area networks. There are many different classifications, implementations, and uses for VPNs.

VPNs offer benefits but have some big drawbacks:

  • Properly setting up a VPN often requires solid technical know-how.
  • Setting up a VPN requires hardware/software combination setup. Further, certain VPNs don’t necessarily work out of the box. Many require special software to be installed and supported which could be a problem for someone that is not specialized in this type of thing.
  • Setting up a VPN can be expensive.
  • VPNs requires setting up and remembering various additional passwords.
  • When you’re connected via VPN you don’t have automatic access to any of the Bonjour Services running on your network. You need to know the exact IP address of the machine you wish to connect to and even then, not all applications run reliably over VPN connections.

ShareTool the new VPN utility

ShareTool is a magical utility that changes all of that. ShareTool is the new VPN that can often be setup by anyone in 5 minutes. No technical skills required.

ShareTool is a smart, easy, and highly secure utility that lets you connect to most Bonjour services running on your home/office networks from anywhere in the world at a click of a button. This includes Screen Sharing, File Sharing, Remote Printing, Secure Browsing, and more. While connected with ShareTool, many shared (Bonjour-enabled) services on your remote home or office networks automatically appear in your Finder, iTunes, iPhoto, and tons of other applications (just as they would if you were physically located at that network). Further, and in response to massive demand, the latest version, ShareTool 2.1.1, also delivers iTunes Home Sharing across the internet, the ability to run ShareTool as a background service. All traffic is encrypted end to end.

For example, let’s assume you’re away for business or on vacation somewhere. With ShareTool, you would be able to:

  • Browse the web securely using your home/office connection
  • Listen to your entire home iTunes music library
  • iTunes Home Sharing fully supported across the internet
  • Control the screen of any of your home computers
  • Grab that important file you forgot to bring with you
  • Connect to your FileMaker Pro database
  • Connect to your complete home iPhoto library
  • Print on your home network
  • And a whole lot more

In the event that you already use a VPN, ShareTool also provides you with a valuable benefit by automatically providing Bonjour over your VPN connection – something that is not available with VPN alone.

In addition, ShareTool lets you connect to an unlimited number of networks simultaneously. For example, let’s say you work for (or own) a company that has offices in 4 different cities. With ShareTool, you can be connected to all 4 networks simultaneously and have access to Bonjour Services from all 4 networks instantly. It’s like being in 4 different places at the same time. The possibilities are endless. All this is done over a highly encrypted connected that works faster than a VPN connection.

Who uses ShareTool?

ShareTool is being adopted by many Mac users around the globe for it’s simplicity, reliability, and security, and speed. There is almost no technical know-how required and 99% of all ShareTool setups are completed with just one mouse click.

Registered ShareTool 1.x users can upgrade to ShareTool 2.x for the reduced price of $15 (for two licenses).

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The Yazsoft team came together in 2001 to develop software expressly for the Mac platform. With an emphasis on total customer satisfaction, Yazsoft makes up a development team of 5 professionals, each responsible for coding, marketing, and total customer support. As Yazsoft’s spotlight product, Speed Download is regularly updated to ensure optimal performance at all times. Copyright (C) 2001-2008 Yazsoft. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Back to my Mac are registered trademarks of Apple Computer in the U.S. and/or other countries.