TeamViewer rocks when bandwidth sucks

In recent months, while this blog has been quiet, I've been spending a lot of time exploring the quirks of Kilgray's memoQ cloud service for a group project with challenging data volumes and other factors that make me thank the gods for doum palm tea. Expanded capacity at the secure data center in Germany early this year largely eliminated intermittent response time difficulties for memoQ cloud, so that I was able to work well during the week at my office with its outstanding Internet bandwidth. On weekends, however, work was a little more difficult.

I have an excellent 4G modem which I take with me around town and on trips within Portugal, and it allows me to work nearly as well as I can in my office with its 100/30 Mbps capacity. As luck would have it, however, at the home of a friend I visit on weekends, my provider has very little signal, usually middling 3G reception on a good day. While this might be considered normal in the heart of darkest Brandenburg, it is unusual for the technologically advanced country I now live in, but so it goes.

I had been dealing with the bandwidth difficulty by downloading the server project resources and using them in a completely local project, because 8 seconds to confirm a translation segment in the server-based is really not a good thing. I must emphasize this is not the fault of the server technology used or the capacity leased by Kilgray at the data center (any more), but rather my lousy bandwidth and probably also the fact that I travel with a crappy, low-end, low-RAM, disposable Asus laptop that isn't really good for much more than clicking through PowerPoint slides in a lecture. However, it still performs adequately for my purposes working in local memoQ projects as long as I don't do anything exotic like try to open a web browser at the same time.

Or so it was until something got corrupted and memoQ displayed its new "cascading error" feature, which causes a continuous loop of modal error dialogs in every open project and requires the Windows Task Manager to shoot down the application and make my escape. Not a good thing with impending deadlines.

Fortunately I usually leave TeamViewer running on my main working machine in the office in case I want to check mail on accounts I don't have set up in the mail client of my miserable road laptop or if I need to retrieve files or other small tasks. I do occasionally perform serious application work on the office machine from a remote system, but I am not in the habit of translating that way. This time, however, it was necessary to do so, because I really did not have time to troubleshoot the problems of my local CAT tool installation.

One reason I don't like to work on the remote office computer is that the resolution of the two screens on my work desk in the office is much higher than the screen resolution of my laptop. This means that even with good glasses I squint to make out details a lot. However, by changing the screen resolution in the Windows Control Panel of my remote system and setting it to more or less the same value as my laptop's resolution, the display of the remote system becomes much more comfortable to use.

After a few minutes in my new work mode, I was regretting not doing this before. My Internet bandwidth was entirely adequate for the remote connection, with no delays perceived for screen refreshes. And the remote system, with its excellent bandwidth in the office and better hardware (faster processor, eight times as much RAM and SSD drives for storage), performed far better than my laptop working with locally installed software. I finished my work in half the time I expected to.

This should be no surprise to the many people who work in a similar way with remote access tools. I've been aware of the possibilities myself for years and shown this way of working more than a few times in demonstrations, but it is still hard sometimes to overcome the feeling that "local is better", though in this case it clearly was not.

This same method can also be useful here for work in the summer, when outdoor temperatures near 50°C can render the office environment unfit for human activity; I can retreat to the cooler rooms of the house with a laptop and still enjoy the full power of my main working machine.

Something like this might be worth considering if you travel often and miss the power of a desktop system you leave behind, or if you prefer to use such a system from various locations. There are many remote connection alternatives to TeamViewer, such as the free Chrome Remote Desktop, with which I have also had very satisfactory experiences in tests of remote input by speech recognition in many languages on Android devices, for example. Explore the possibilities.

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A further note on bandwidth: I spent a few days in the Algarve recently, at a location with the most miserable bandwidth I have seen in years. My 4G modem, which has performed well in many locations in the country where I live and even on travels in Spain and France, could do no better than a pokey 2G connection much of the time. Most web pages timed out with the attempt to view them. TeamViewer's screen refresh was slow - like a fade effect in a PowerPoint presentation - and the keyboard input lagged a bit, but it was still adequate for checking the status of various things on my computer back at the office.

TeamViewer and Dragon Naturally Speaking: currently a bad mix

On New Year's Eve I took delivery of new hardware to support my translation work. This will be the first time in more than a decade that the bulk of my work will not be done on a laptop, but the demands I've put on my hardware in recent years are a bit much for any laptop I'm willing to invest in. Now set with 32 GB RAM, a few SSD drives, souped-up video and other features to make my work go with a bit less hassle, I decided it was time to try the remote access solutions that some of my friends and colleagues have relied on for the past few years. I've been particularly impressed with what one of them does running all the applications on his home system with excellent performance from his desk at work or other remote locations. At last I am ready to do the same.

The new dream machine is still being configured, but I've got memoQ and other useful tools loaded, even SDL Trados Studio 2014 carefully isolated in a well-configured VMware machine to avoid trashing my main system as SDL software always has in the past.

There are, of course, many possibilities for remote access. Because I use TeamViewer sometimes for remote assistance to clients and colleagues and impromptu mini-webinars of an informal nature, I thought I would try the new, improved access in version 9 that one colleague mentioned. Things have looked quite good on the whole.

The only major failure I have experienced has been with voice recognition. I use Dragon Naturally Speaking sometimes for my translation work, and out of curiosity I decided to try it with a text I had in SDL Trados Studio on the virtual machine on the remote computer. Typing worked just fine in this configuration.

Dictation with DNS was another matter altogether. Sentences were not capitalized at the beginning, and small pauses in my voice caused spaces to be dropped in the text on the remote virtual machine. Now I know that even Trados isn't this bad with dictation, so I repeated the test in a simple word processor on the VM and repeated it in the same word processor in the remote host system. In each case, the problem was the same: failures to capitalize the beginning of sentences and frequent dropped spaces. I had to discipline myself to speak capitalization commands and insert spaces by voice after any pause. Editing by voice was also impossible and had to be done manually with the mouse and keyboard. Word accuracy was as good as ever, but that's not surprising, as that processing all occurs locally. The difficulties are in transmission to the remote system.

I suspect this is a problem to be addressed by TeamViewer rather than Nuance. I am very curious to see whether other remote access solutions have similar difficulties. If anyone else has relevant experience with this, please share it.

TeamViewer as a collaboration tool

I recently had the pleasure of participating in the Nationaal Vertaalcongres 2013, the twentieth anniversary celebration conference for the Dutch training company Teamwork. The best part for me was that I could do so from home in another country.

I was the remote half of a presentation at the conference by my colleague (Chartered Linguist) Christina Guy, a Dutch to English legal translation specialist and founder of Stridonium, a private site for professional exchange and support for translators now also exploring new alternatives for large project cooperation with its TagTeams to better serve translation buyers tired of being mauled by agency lions who often use inferior grades of "vendors" as so much cheap meat and try to hide the stench of their roadkill translations by redefining quality as whatever they can get away with.

As part of the conference session on team collaboration, we demonstrated how we have used TeamViewer software in the past two years for troubleshooting, CAT tool instruction and work together on editing and copywriting projects.

In our interactive TeamViewer sessions, we are able to view remote screens on any monitor of the presenter's workstation, switch the presentation from one workstation to another, use audio to discuss the project, send text messages in a "chat" field and even allow the other person to exercise remote control of a presenting workstation. When the person viewing a remote screen wants to indicate some part of the screen requiring attention, a click at that spot causes a big blue "nag arrow" to appear (as it does in the screenshot of the pretranslation dialog for memoQ shown above). This has been very useful in tutorial sessions I have conducted for a number of people.

Christina's presentation showed how TeamViewer served as a critical tool for overcoming many challenges for working together interactively on projects over great distances in a way less likely to light fuses through misunderstanding a description or question. We showed brief examples of tutorial exchanges, review of a bilingual press release and work on a PowerPoint presentation - just a few of the many tasks for which TeamViewer has proved useful. Judging from the comments she received about her presentation afterwards, the idea was extremely well received.

I am, on the whole, quite skeptical of online presentation formats, particularly the much-loved "webinars". Certainly I have seen a number of excellent web-based presentations, and the opportunity to watch the masterful staging of such events behind the scenes with Kilgray's head of development, Gábor Ugray some months ago did a lot to address my objections and increase the likelihood that I might use conventional webinars as a communication vehicle myself some day, but on the whole, TeamViewer is a tool more to my taste. The logistics of using it are much simpler, and I feel it allows more focused, personal and effective presentations that fit the way I like to work and teach. Someone familiar with the Citrix presentation technologies and TeamViewer would probably object that I am not really comparing like with like here, and that objection would be correct. The real point is that I prefer more spontaneous, personal interaction with individuals or a small group, and TeamViewer is better suited to that.

TeamViewer played an important role in the development of many of the tutorials in my book of memoQ tips, and after the many good experiences using it to work with Christina and others it inspired me to develop some new approaches to software tutorials for corporate clients. I think that today's presentation at the Nationaal Vertaalcongres 2013 may inspire the translators in attendance to explore possibilities for using this tool to solve their own remote communication challenges. Why not try it yourself? It takes just a few minutes to download the software, and use for non-commercial purposes (like explaining some hellish Trados import filter to a bewildered colleague) is free. Go to the TeamViewer site to download it or see the many options available.

Remote presentations and tutoring

I must confess that I am not really a great fan of remote viewers and the like on principle. The technology has been around quite a while, and about the time my friends in IT tech support developed enthusiasm for doing remote maintenance, I was running from tech support roles as fast as my legs could carry me. And while I appreciate a good webinar quite a lot, even the best cannot, in my opinion, match the value of personal delivery. When I deliver a lecture or workshop I like to see the faces of the participants, read their body language, ask them questions. And software just doesn't do that well in my opinion, even when the features are there.

But... I spend a lot of time on the phone explaining things to people who feel they are experiencing the inexplicable with the translation environment tools. And unfortunately not everyone uses the right descriptive terminology to give me a clear picture of the problem. So one day, while I was getting quite frustrated trying to picture what a user was doing on her screen, one of us thought of using TeamViewer (and it surely wasn't me). The quickie show & tell mutated into several hours of highly productive coaching, which was repeated on a few occasions with this person and others. I wasn't impressed with the quality of sound transmission via my UMTS data connection, but the visuals worked well. More recent tests with Netviewer left me very impressed by this platform's sound quality and features, so I may use this for coaching and remote group instruction.

I still prefer to deliver workshops of several hours in person, even if it means I have to travel across half the continent to do so. I really do believe that is most effective, and I learn a great deal from talking to the participants informally about their experience. That is really missing in the online medium. But I think now when calls for help come in or a colleague needs to see exactly how a particular procedure works, we might all save time and frustration with remote technology after all. That may sound a bit Jurassic, but I really don't like to use technology unless I see a clear benefit to it which cannot be achieved by better means.

Now that I have "the bug", of course, a number of useful possibilities are seeping into my mind. "Teaser demos" of presentations usually delivered in person in a longer format, for example. Whatever I end up doing with this, I am far more optimistic about the technology than I was. Have you used it as a presenter or participant? What advantages and drawbacks have you experienced?