Anyone who's tried to manage more than one Mac at a time knows what a pain it can be.

Upgrading software, setting preferences, running maintenance scripts - it all has to be done many times. If those are work Macs, you have to traipse around a building or between sites. It's for all these reasons that companies with numerous Macs tend to buy a copy of Apple Remote Desktop.

ARD, as it's known in the business, is a combination of tools. For helpdesk staff, it's the ultimate user-removal tool. Not only can you view the screen of the user on the other end of the phone line to see what they can see, you can control their Mac and fix it for them.

For sys admins, it's a great way to install software without having to be at the Macs: select the computers you want to install the software on, select the software and ARD will do the rest. And for the IT manager who wants to know which Mac has which hardware and software, the reporting tools are a real time-saver.

It's curtains for Apple

ARD 2 had a good feature set, but ARD 3 adds to the list considerably, particularly if you've made the move to Tiger. For helpdesk staff, the big improvement has been the addition of a 'Curtain mode'.

Previous versions allowed you to view and control the mouse and keyboard of any Mac in ARD's list of computers, but you can now stop the end user from seeing what's going on, locking the screen and putting up a message to prevent interference.

Another useful feature is the ability to drag and drop files between your own Mac and the controlled Mac's screen, and the ability to copy and paste text and images - handy for entering software serial numbers from your own Mac's database into new apps that need registering.

Performance seems to have improved as well, with the slow screen redraw rate of previous versions much better this time. Similarly, some of the issues around using ARD to control and monitor Windows and Linux machines using VNC have been fixed, although there's no equivalent to the ARD client for either platform yet.