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One of the hardest things about doing IT support over the phone can be actually determining what problem the customer has encountered. Lots of people can not gasp the concept that the techie on the other end of the phone does not know every detail of the product intimately. They give vague descriptions and use terms like “thingy” and “whatyermacallit”. Not really helpful to the person on the other end of the line trying to solve their problem for them. Or the other favourite, you give them explicit instructions on where to click and they totally ignore you and click else where. I’m not going to get involved in customer bashing, there are plenty of sites out there like Clientcopia and Not Always Right out there that do that. I want to look at two ways of making this process easier.

One of the nice things about being an internal IT guy is the ability to have some kind of remote desktop viewer/control software installed like Real VNC. Saving you the hassle of having rely upon the customer who might not be computer literate, these kinds of programs allow you to view or even take control of the users PC and see for yourself exactly how it is responding to various inputs. It’s not as easy for support staff from third party software providers like me though. Most IT departments wont allow you to use there remote support structure to help a client with an issue (obviously there are exceptions to this. Usually they don’t wish to make changes to how their infrastructure is set up to allow access (i.e. port routing to allow VNC access from outside their network).

Thankfully there is a way around this, two that I have some experience with in fact. One is make by log me in, a company who’s utilities I have used for a while especially the remote desktop connection, called Log Me In Rescue and the other is an application called Team Viewer. For a while at work we have had Log Me In Rescue and have found it to be very useful but now we have also purchased a Team Viewer license.

Both provide the same basic features:

• Remotely connect to a client PC across the internet with out any pre installed software
• No need to set up any port forwarding to get past a router
• Full control of the client PC as if you were set in front of it
• File Transfer through the software

Log Me In provides a few extra features most of which a competent IT person should be able to determine from the PC by built in parts of Windows (i.e. running processes, service, etc). One extra it does provide though is the ability to have the user input their domain log in and password so that you can reboot the machine and get it to log back in with out their interaction. Useful if they go off to do something else while you fix the problem.

Team Viewer has the basics, file transfer and remote control. One advantage it does seem to have though, it works correctly under a Windows Vista PC with User Account Control enabled (Log Me In Rescue will only allow you to view the desktop under UAC). The other advantage with Team Viewer is scalability. By default both systems only allow one concurrent user of the software at a time. Both have the option to buy additional users, with Log Me In each users cost the same as the original. Team Viewer cuts the price for additionally users. Also long term costs for Team Viewer are better. Log Me In works on a yearly subscription, so each year you have to pay again. Team Viewer works on a life time license so when you buy it you can use it forever. Although upgrades to the new versions maybe chargeable.

Over all both software’s have their merits. Log Me In is good in many aspects but a lot of the extra features you pay for can be done by other means. Team Viewer is a little more basic, but it still gets the job done.

As an added bonus, Team Viewer has a version that is free for none commercial use, so if you need to remotely support a family member’s PC you can download and run it free of charge.