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Best Windows remote support / screen sharing tools?
What remote support software do you use?
How much of your support is done remotely versus on-site?
Any metrics your company is using to quantify the savings/profit remote support has contributed to your company?
LogMeIn is the primary way
Secondary way, All computers have remote desktop turned on as the secondary and the network forwards the remote desktop port to one computer. So I can login via remote desktop to one computer and then remote to any other. I'll filter the IP for forwarding of that port so it only comes from my IP's
Also since LogMeIn is outbound connections there is nothing to open on the firewall
I do everything remotely unless its actually setting up a new computer or moving hardware or fixing hardware.
For servers we use RDC, but for workstations, because we may want the user to see what we are doing, we use IntelliAdmin.
I have mentioned IntelliAdmin on here many times. It lets you directly connect to any machine on your network very easily and quickly...even stealthy if you want. You can control the users keyboard and mouse and even lock the user out if you want. Its as if you were physically in front of the remote machine.
It requires no installation of 3rd-party software for the LAN edition. There is an internet edition that requires 3rd part software on the remote machine.
We use Single Click version of UltraVNC. Our customers download a small executable from our website and initiate the connection to us.
Single Click can be used on Vista, but it is slow unless you change the theme to Windows Classic
We install the full version of UltraVNC on any terminals we supply, so we can remote provide support.
I like lots of options...
For my servers, I go RDP or VNC -- or even iLO2 if nothing else works. I love the mRemote app to keep everything in one tabbed window. Worth a look if you spend a lot of time on a lot of systems remotely. Even does SSH.
I use the free LogMeIn app with many remote clients. For interactive sharing/trouble-shooting I'll use CrossLoop instead.
Around the office I'll use ChrisControl (download) to "push" a VNC server and then connect when we need to do screen sharing. Otherwise I'll go RDP there as well.
We use UltraVNC. Getting through the firewall was a challenge to do, but mostly because I wasn't very familiar with port forwarding. When it works, it works great. But there are issues with Vista, anytime Vista asks for User Account Control, UltraVNC drops the connection. At other times it just seems that UltraVNC won't work at all, for some reason unknown to me. In these cases I've bought day-passes at copilot.com, or used a trial version of some other software.
90 -95% of support is done remotely. An on-site visit for me is very rare.
Unfortunately, I don't have any metrics on savings/profit of remote support. If I base it on about 10 on-site support issues a year (1 day apiece), considering my salary, travel expenses, time away from other issues, etc. we are probably saving around $4000 to $5000 per year.
I also use LogMeIn.com for my personal computers at home.
To "ride along" with the user, we've used RealVNC for years on Windows XP. (We deploy it with an MSI package and an MST to set a per-Customer password.) This is problematic with Windows Vista, but since our Customers have largely skipped Windows Vista (where we have been, grudgingly, using LogMeIn) we have punted on that issue for now.
We've been using LogMeIn on Windows Vista machines, grudgingly, with success. Unless you pay them, however, you don't get an MSI-based installer. (You can do some rather creative hacks with the "free" edition to get an MSI, but it's not worth the trouble.)
Remote Desktop is enabled via Group Policy on every computer (server, client computer, etc). For support issues that don't require seeing what the user sees, we use that.
I had an interest level in solicited Remote Assistance functionality, but I never did the work to get that going. I'd be interested to hear from people who have, because the more I can use built-in Windows functionality the happier I am.
I can't give you a "hard dollar number", but we'd be hard pressed to service the number of Customers (and raw counts of individual PCs) that we do w/o VPNs and remote control tools.
Almost 100% of support is done remotely. We use Novell's integrated remote desktop support ... or if that's not working for whatever reason, we use CoPilot.
We use RDP for just about everything but occasionally use www.GoToMeeting.com if the user needs to see we're doing or vice versa. GoToMeeting is probably not the best solution for lots of support, but we're very happy with it for meetings so it's Convenient for support as well.
We use ScriptLogic's Desktop Authority. Remote control as well as login script management, etc. for AD domains.
We push TightVNC out via group policy to oncampus workstations, and will work with users that way on occasion. There's only 2 of us to support about 110 users.
