Additional features to Screen Sharing in OS X

Even though it has been a feature of OS X for several years now Screen Sharing doesn’t get the recognition I feel it deserves especially considering this is an inbuilt feature. In 10.7 Apple added some nice new features which make it even better but during training courses I still find delegates that did not know about them.

They have now added the ability to use, per user Screen Sharing. This means that if your machine has multiple user accounts and is currently being used by someone else, you can simply log in with your account credentials when selecting screen sharing and this will give you the option to either take control of the current User session, or log in to your own users session.

Another new feature, is that they have incorporated a toolbar into the screen sharing application. Below are the options you can add or remove from your toolbar.

The Control Mode is a feature I’m glad that has been included in the new toolbar. The only issue I have is that by default you take control straight away and if you are connecting to a machine that someone is still working on with maybe only the one account, it can freak the user out when the mouse starts moving before you have made them aware.
It is possible to adjust this through the Screen Sharing Preferences. Either start up a screen sharing session or go to, /System/Library/CoreServices and load up the application from there. Load the Application Preferences to adjust the Setting in which, once connected, you always take control to initially observe.

Screen sharing is relatively under used and for most is very much overshadowed by Apple Remote Desktop, but in a company environment where you have just started to integrate Macs then this built in feature will go a long way in easily supporting your users without additional costs.