All my employees work from home and when we need to get together to bang on something, we use a shared desktop over VNC. Getting the appropriate responsiveness and speed out of VNC is a matter of using the right client; plain-vanilla standard VNC and UltraVNC is pretty slow, but TightVNC is quite acceptable. I haven't had any problems with NAT traversal on it either, although we run OpenVPN internally and every person's work machine is on it, so the routing is directly over the tunnel to a server reachable only through the VPN concentrator.
My favourite thing about VNC is that it really scales fairly well even to a large number of remote viewers, and doesn't incur licensing costs per marginal head. We are also VoIP guys, so of course we run Asterisk internally and all have pretty decent handsets or softphones that are just one three-digit extension away from each other. Push a few buttons and we can all hop on an internal conference bridge and on our shared VNC - it gets things done.
Still, sometimes it's too much overhead just to perform a simple task and screen does quite well.
All my employees work from home and when we need to get together to bang on something, we use a shared desktop over VNC. Getting the appropriate responsiveness and speed out of VNC is a matter of using the right client; plain-vanilla standard VNC and UltraVNC is pretty slow, but TightVNC is quite acceptable. I haven't had any problems with NAT traversal on it either, although we run OpenVPN internally and every person's work machine is on it, so the routing is directly over the tunnel to a server reachable only through the VPN concentrator.
My favourite thing about VNC is that it really scales fairly well even to a large number of remote viewers, and doesn't incur licensing costs per marginal head. We are also VoIP guys, so of course we run Asterisk internally and all have pretty decent handsets or softphones that are just one three-digit extension away from each other. Push a few buttons and we can all hop on an internal conference bridge and on our shared VNC - it gets things done.
Still, sometimes it's too much overhead just to perform a simple task and screen does quite well.