Remote PC Monitor

I'm looking at developing a simple program to monitor whether or not a PC is on / responsive. I was planning on doing it by sending out pings to the remote machines every 15 minutes. However, my company is filtering out all external outbound ping packets. Is there any similar way to do this without using ping?

Thanks.

You can write your own client/server app that you can use winsock... With winsock you can try and communicate with the remote PCs running the client and see if they respond or not...