Thanks Titan for weighing in on this issue ... All very true, I guess. Have not tried any of these solutions. I was not aware iChat could provide voice comm as well as screen sharing. I never liked logmein perhaps because when it first came out, I was working with Windows, and it was like a virus or AOL in that it was very difficult to get rid of it.
Any program that does not have a well behaved way of uninstalling has no place on my systems. I don't want to deal with files left behind after uninstall which screw up a fresh new install. But that was on the Windows platform or how the uninstall works on the MAC platform.
FYI I happen to like VNC and prior to my involvement with the Mac platform, it served me very well.
The advantage of ARD is having most mgt functions under one roof. I have not run into the problems that others have experienced with ARD yet - possibly because I have 100% of my clients on Lion with the latest updates. In addition, I am doing only very basic stuff with the product.
I am a developer and have experience with scripting which I hope to use to supplement ARD's capabilities.
The way I plan to overcome the issue of changing IPs of my off-LAN remotes is create a little system using one script to be installed on all the remotes and another script on my mgt computer. The remote script would capture the current IP every hour or so and then send an email to my mgt computer when the IP changed.
The mgt computer would use email rules and run a script to update the ARD database by parsing the new IP from the emails sent by the remotes. I just don't know the details of updating the ARD database yet and wheather or not ARD would accept data submitted this way instead of via the user interface.
We'll see.