Techsupport has come a long way when the support person had to rely on the end user to explain what they were seeing on their screen over a remote conference call. If at all possible, sneakernet was the best possible way (and in some cases, the only possible way) to get an actual description of what the person having the issue was seeing. The feelings found in the old addage recorded on Snopes at http://www.snopes.com/humor/business/wordperfect.asp seemed all too common.
Nowdays, remote desktop sharing has become one of the normal “first step” methods of actually seeing the problem for yourself. Netmeeting from Microsoft worked alright for a while. It came installed on a lot of systems, or could be downloaded. Then along came Windows 7 and that went away. Microsoft has other solutions, but when you’re working with users of varying degrees of skills with the computer, and IT departments which limit what can be installed and executed, Netmeeting was not a reliable solution.
My next experience with remote assistance was using “LogMeIn” from http://www.logmein.com. It was nice and fast over slow connections, could be installed quickly, but once again, it involved installing an executable on another computer, giving full remote access to the controlling person who could come back at any time to log in and do what was needed. This was alright for some extremely trusting people, but when it came to remote support for users who may or may not fully trust you, it was a different story.
Through the full-time job that I have, I was introduced to MeetingPlace from Cisco (http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/ps5664/ps5669/index.html) This is a great product which connected developers across remote sites together for document sharing, desktop sharing, teleconferincing, (and now video conferencing). It can also be used for tech-support calls. It is a nice solution for a large company who can dedicate the purchase for the hardware (incoming telephone lines, hefty computer, etc). The only downside for small businesses is the cost. (In my experience, anything that has listed as “Call for a Price” or “Request a Price” on the page is normally more than a small home office with a few clients is going to be ready to pay).
My next experience was with “WebEx” (http://www.webex.com). It is all done online and hosted “somewhere else”, which makes the on-site hardware requirements a non-problem. It has a starter plan, reasonably priced at $19 a month which includes VoIP teleconferencing. Plans which involve more than a single host and 8 users, as well as dial-in plans start running the bill up a bit more. Still, for the amount of use that it can get, it’s a reasonably priced system for what you get, and the experience the person on the other end gets of being able to show exactly what the problem is and explain it from their perspective (or for using in large tele/video conferences to share a desktop and slideshow presentation, or for collaboration, or any number of other things that you can use them for.).
The products listed are all great, but for my home use, I don’t play tech support as much as I used to (people do eventually learn how to use computers and young nephews grow up to learn how to work the computer and provide local support to the relatives they live near), so the calls for remote assisstance have gone down, making the $19 a month option not something I feel that I need at this point, but it did leave me wondering what was out there in the Open Source arena that would do at least some of the things of the other features. I was pleasantly surprised to find OpenMeetings (http://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/) It was written by someone who obviously is not a native english speaker, so some touchup of configuration files and screens for proper spelling is inline, but they have done an incredible job in providing features and making different applications work together in order to provide the live tele/video/web conferencing available for “free” to those who have the patience to get it set up on their own server. It’s running on mine, and already coming in handy. Be sure to check out the demo if it is something that interests you.